This post is part of the 7-part series Seven Top Benefits of Virtualizing Business Critical Applications.
Key datacenter resources are compute, memory, network, and storage.
Application owners are sometimes reluctant to virtualize because they feel they no longer get 100 percent of server resources. As it turns out, features within VMware allow for business-critical applications to hold reservations and minimums to enable them to get the highest QoS in the datacenter, even if they are sharing physical resources with other less critical applications.
IT administrators are expected to achieve the business’ required service levels—for every single application and application tier. Features like Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Network I/O Control, and Storage I/O
Control help you maintain service levels through intelligent allocation and performance.
- DRS continuously monitors resource utilization and intelligently allocates across virtual machines. That means the applications that you’ve ranked as the highest priority get the resources they need, when they need them. vSphere DRS delivers the performance, scalability, and availability that may be impossible to achieve in a physical infrastructure. Beyond higher hardware utilization and reduced energy consumption, business units also gain dedicated IT resources, empowering them to build and manage virtual machines—all under centralized IT control.
- Network I/O Control enables performance. Once you configure rules and policies to specify priorities of each VM, Network I/O Control automatically adjusts resources so you can improve service levels and virtualize more types of workloads.
- Storage I/O Control enables a pre-programmed response when a storage resource becomes contentious. When congestion is detected, Storage I/O Control dynamically allocates available resources based on your policies. Further, Storage I/O Control enables performance for your most important VMs, and provides an additional level of isolation in a private or public cloud.
- CPU Reservations and Memory Reservations provide resource levels for critical apps.
