The Consul control plane contains one or more _datacenters_. A datacenter is the smallest unit of Consul infrastructure that can perform basic Consul operations. A datacenter contains at least one [Consul server agent](#server-agents), but a real-world deployment contains three or five server agents and several [Consul client agents](#client-agents). You can create multiple datacenters and allow nodes in different datacenters to interact with each other. Refer to [Bootstrap a Datacenter](/consul/docs/deploy/server/vm/bootstrap) for information about how to create a datacenter.