Can vCenter manage hosts both inside and outside the local network?

[hatchmt]

Can vCenter Server 5.5 manage vSphere hosts that are located both on the local network and (with proper ports opened on the firewall) hosts located on other networks?

What I'm trying to do is:

We have four groups of vSphere hosts that are all firewalled from each other in our datacenter. I would like to have a single instance of vCenter Server managing all of the hosts. vCenter is hosted in a VM on one of these hosts, so what we have is one set of hosts on a local network to vCenter and three sets that are accessed externally.

What I've encountered, however, is that the "remote" hosts disconnect after a minute or so (return heartbeat doesn't make it to vCenter) unless I change the Managed IP Address in vCenter Server Settings to the external address of vCenter. That fixes the external hosts, but now causes the internal hosts to fail.

Is there a way to have it both ways? Some sort of workaround? I'd appreciate your thoughts. Thanks!

[dhanarajramesh]

for the best practice,  please make sure U have configured unique VLAN for Managemnt IP as well for Vmotion traffic . and heartbeat traffic always carried by UDP port 902. please check with network firewalls team members that the UDP 902 port connection working bidirectional  between vcenter and all of the hosts.  For management/vmotion IPs, if they configured PAT configuration on firewall ( address translation between  internal and external network ) ask them to change to NAT configuration. and also check PORT 902  on the the hosts vpxa.cfg file. more than this check vcenter server OS firewall configuration side these UDP 902 port working in bidirectional.