As you hopefully saw in my first blog, vRealize Operations 7.0 is the key to your new self-driving driving datacenter! If you missed it you can read it HERE. Enjoy! But that’s not the end of the self-driving story. You can now drive your business intent (license enforcement, SLAs, compliance, etc) all the way down to your hosts with Host Based Placement! Let me explain…
Many customers have LARGE clusters containing hosts serving different business purposes or datacenters with single massive clusters in them. Driving business intent at the cluster level just doesn’t make sense in these situations. Instead they need the ability to create logical boundaries around hosts within the cluster and honor business intent within these boundaries (these hosts for Oracle, these hosts for MSFT, etc). Until now customers could only do this with DRS, but that is complex and maintaining DRS rules to do this is too difficult. Wouldn’t it be GREAT if you could automatically drive your business intent from ONE place? The answer is vRealize Operations! With 7.0 you can:
- Have your business intent jointly honored by vRealize Operations and DRS
- Greatly simplify the creation of DRS rules for your business needs
- Automatically fix business intent violations at the cluster AND host level
Let me show you how it works…
- First go into the Business Intent widget in the Workload Optimization screen.
- Next select Host Based tag placement. Note: You can use either Host Based or Cluster Based intents, but not both in the same DC/CDC. This capability also uses vSphere tagging to match VMs with hosts. Simply pick the tags you want to enforce/honor.
- Host Based Placement works WITH vROps will create DRS rules to enforce your business intent between hosts. Basically, the tagging information for VMs and hosts is used to create VM group and host group affinity rules.
- If you have DRS rules for VM-VM and VM-Host affinity/anti-affinity then vROps will check them and let you know if your business intent conflicts with your user-created DRS rules. vROps will also check every 5 mins to make sure now NEW rules conflict with your business intent. You have the option to review them and if you agree, the user-created rules will be disabled. They can be enabled later if you decide to not use Host Based Placement.
- vROps will now create DRS groups and rules in vCenter. The objects created by vROps have naming conventions to make them easy to identify. For instance, each rule will follow a vROps_
- <Tag Category>_<Tag>_AR format. For example vROps_License_Oracle_AR (the “AR” stands for “Automated Rule”)
This short video on Host Based Placement really explains it best.
