The new Rapid Scale-Out policy for VMware Cloud on AWS is ideal for events like disaster recovery and bulk workload migration – enabling you to add up to four hosts in parallel at one time for lightning fast scalability. Rapid Scale-Out is just one option within the Elastic DRS feature in VMware Cloud on AWS.
Elastic DRS (EDRS) is an incredible feature included with VMware Cloud on AWS that I’ve written about previously. Up until now, there have been three different policies to choose from – Storage Only, Performance, and Cost based. With these existing EDRS policies, the scale-out of a cluster only occurs after resource demands remain high for a certain period of time. Once the scale-out is triggered, hosts are added conservatively, in a serial fashion, one at a time.
Today, I’m happy to announce a fourth policy is now available.
Rapid Scale-Out
EDRS Rapid Scale-Out is configured to react faster and to add hosts in parallel, up to four at a time, to allow a cluster to scale-out more quickly during an event. Some primary use cases that can benefit from this new policy are disaster recovery events, significant VDI power-on events, or even bulk workload migration/power-on events. The Rapid Scale-Out maximum resources thresholds are the same as the EDRS Performance Policy thresholds, but the minimum thresholds are set to 0%. This allows for a scale-out task to kick off quicker but also means we will not automatically scale-in; scale-in will be a manual process driven by the customer.
| EDRS Policy | CPU Thresholds | Memory Thresholds | Storage Thresholds |
| Rapid Scale-Out | High: 80%, Low: 0% | High: 80%, Low: 0% | High: 70%, Low: 0% |
| Performance | High: 90%, Low: 50% | High: 80%, Low: 50% | High: 70%, Low: 20% |
| Cost | High: 90%, Low: 60% | High: 80%, Low: 60% | High: 70%, Low: 20% |
| Storage Only | N/A | N/A | High: 70%, Low: 0% |
Enabling the Policy
To enable EDRS Rapid Scale-Out, edit the EDRS settings of your cluster, and choose the new policy.
You can also enable this via the edrs-policy API. Kyle Ruddy wrote a great article on managing EDRS policies via RESTful APIs.
Resources
For other information related to VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some more learning resources for you:
- You can learn more about our VMware Cloud on AWS service at the VMware Cloud on AWS website or by viewing VMware Cloud on AWS: Overview.
- Follow us on Twitter @vmwarecloudaws and give us a shout with #VMWonAWS.
- Watch informative demos, overview videos, webinars, and hear from our customers: VMware Cloud on AWS on YouTube.
- Try the VMware Cloud on AWS Lightning Lab for a first-hand immersive experience.
- Read our latest VMware Cloud on AWS blogs.
- Obtain the VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Brief and VMware Cloud on AWS TCO 1-pager.
- Follow the VMware Cloud on AWS release notes on continuing updates.
- Visit VMware Cloud Tech Zone for technical articles, guides, videos and more
- Explore Feature Walkthroughs of Deployment, Configuration, Networking, and more.
- Listen to the latest episodes of VMware Cloud on AWS Unplugged Podcast.
