When deploying virtual machines (VMs), where they land matters — not just for performance, but for efficiency, compliance, and cost. That’s where Workload Placement in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) comes in. It finds the ideal cluster or host for each VM by evaluating real-time capacity, performance data, and your organization’s business or operational intent.

In short, it helps ensure every workload lands exactly where it should — without the manual guesswork.

Why Workload Placement Matters

If you’ve ever had to manually decide where to deploy a new workload, you know how easy it is to create resource hotspots or imbalance within your clusters. Workload Placement eliminates that uncertainty.

By continuously analyzing real-time capacity and performance metrics, VCF automatically recommends — or even performs — optimal VM placements. This ensures your workloads meet performance, compliance, and cost objectives while freeing your teams to focus on innovation instead of firefighting.

How It Works: The “Smart Room Planner” Analogy

Think of Workload Placement as a smart room planner for your data center.

Each VM is a piece of furniture — some large, some small, all with specific needs. The clusters and hosts are rooms with varying space, lighting, and features. Workload Placement evaluates the “furniture” and the “rooms” to find the perfect fit.

Step-by-Step Process

Workload Placement within VMware Cloud Foundation involves the following steps:

1. Collect VM requirements: CPU, memory, storage needs, and relevant tags (more on this later).
2. Inventory targets: Cluster and host utilization, storage performance, and tag data.
3. Filter: Eliminate clusters or hosts that don’t meet tag or capacity requirements.
4. Score & rank: Rate remaining targets based on headroom and performance characteristics.
5. Act: Recommend or automatically place the VM using vMotion if needed.
6. Runtime: Once placed, DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) handles per-host balancing inside the chosen cluster.

Expressing Intent with Tags

Workload Placement doesn’t assume how you intend to use your VMs — but Tags can make that intent explicit. Continuing our smart room analogy, you wouldn’t put a bed in the kitchen. Similarly, tags ensure VMs are only placed in clusters meant for their purpose.

For example:

• Tag a VM as SLA|Gold.
• Only clusters or hosts with the same tag (i.e. SLA|Gold) will be considered during placement.

This simple system ensures that business intent guides every placement decision.

A Real-World Example

Imagine you’re deploying a critical business application tagged as SLA Gold.

Workload Placement analyzes these options and may recommend Cluster B — balancing capacity and performance for optimal results.

Key Considerations

• Tag workloads with clear intent – Tier (i.e. Gold, Silver, etc.), Environment (i.e. Dev, Prod, etc.), Operating System (i.e. Windows, Linux, etc.)
• Prioritize clusters with balanced compute and storage performance — not just lowest utilization.
• Review recommendations to validate results before enabling automation.

Workload Placement vs. DRS

It’s easy to confuse the two, but here’s the distinction:

• Workload Placement → Strategic placement across clusters. Think “where should this workload live?”
• DRS → Tactical balancing within a cluster. Think “how do we keep performance steady?”

Together, they deliver end-to-end workload optimization — from intelligent initial placement to continuous balancing.

Final Thoughts

Workload Placement in VMware Cloud Foundation is like having a smart room planner for your virtual machines. It examines every “room” in your data center and decides where each workload fits best — keeping performance high, deployments fast, and compliance intact.

When properly implemented, organizations can expect:

• Higher performance and stability — fewer hotspots and smarter matching of compute, memory, and storage.
• Faster deployments — recommendations remove trial-and-error guesswork.
• Improved compliance — tagging ensures workloads follow business intent.
• Better cost control — balanced utilization reduces overprovisioning and unnecessary hardware spend.

Ready to see Workload Placement in action?
Click here to learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation Workload Placement.