Getting More Out of VMware: Distributed Resource Management

By: Ryan Cartwright, VMware Senior Systems Engineer & Matthew Meyer, VMware Senior Technical Marketing Architect

On June 8^th, we will be hosting a Getting More Out of VMware webinar about Distributed Resource Management using Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vRealize Operations (vR Ops).

In this session, we will examine how to combine DRS and vRealize Operations Manager capabilities to deliver the most efficient compute platform for your virtual machines. We will also show how DRS enables you to enforce user-specified policies that guarantee performance, compliance, and improve manageability of your vSphere environments.

vSphere Fundamentals

This session will start with the fundamentals of resource management, identify common CPU and Memory metrics that identify contention, and how the ESXi host scheduler works to schedule workloads across all available resources.

Memory Optimization

Next, we will cover the ways the ESXi host will optimize memory and discuss different reclaiming techniques to maximize the physical resources available.

DRS

We will then dive into DRS, the crown jewel of vSphere resource management and describe how it incorporates the resource scheduler that is used on a per-host basis, and expands upon that at the cluster level. By aggregating the CPU and Memory capacity on each host into a large pool of logical capacity, virtual machines are able to move hosts when another host is available to better provide the demanded resources.

“Business rules” or “user-defined rules” can cause constraints to be placed on DRS to place VM’s in the form of affinity and anti-affinity rules. We will discuss ways to improve the load balancing for the clusters, and identify advanced settings that could be used to increase the load balancing aspect of DRS.

Workload Placement

Finally, we will cover how vR Ops further enhances the resource distribution and scheduling of a cluster, and uses Workload Placement to balance resource across clusters. See Getting More Out of VMware Webinar on Automated Actions, Load Balancing, and Workload Placement from September 23, 2015 for additional information.

Hopefully you can join us on June 8^th, when we’ll go into more depth about optimizing your cluster capacity using both DRS and vRealize Operations. Click here to register.