Data Center Interconnect

Dividing you servers into different datacenters is a good practices in a few different scenarios. For example in case you'd like to separate your production environment from your test, dev, or Q&A environment. Another scenario in which you might consider using different virtual datacenters, is when you manage multiple customers under your account, and you'd like to completely separate them from each other, as if they are not sharing the same datacenter. Different virtual datacenters will also reflect on your invoice, that will be broken down per virtual datacenter.

From a technical standpoint, separating datacenters means having completely independent servers, and unless the appropriate software is install to establish communication between them, they will behave as if they are in different physical location. Even though traffic doesn't leave our datacenter, servers won't be communicating with each other, so a network tunnel needs to be set up. In order to accomplish this, you must have at least one public IP in each location. You can set up the network traffic over an encrypted connection, like a site-to-site VPN or over an SSH tunnel, whatever fits your needs better.

Observation: VLANs are also completely independent from each other, so you might be having two servers, with the same private IPs under different datacenters.

Thank you for the detailed answer. Is the traffice between datacenters over the VPN billed as normal external traffic?