Alfa BBT » vSphere

DRS Host Affinity rules

Stijn Vermoesen — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:37:07 +0000

One of the new features in vSphere 4.1 is the ability to configure Host affinity rules for DRS. These enable you to split your vSphere cluster in several groups of hosts and assign assign a subset of your VMs to one of these groups.

There are plenty of use cases for this:

- Netapp Metrocluster

- Applications licensed based on CPUs

- performance sensitive applications

- …

In my case the cluster is spread over 2 sites, one production site and a failover site. The failover site is used to run test & dev servers. Only in case of serious problems on the production site the VMs should be moved to the failover site.

Open the cluster settings and create a “Virtual Machines DRS Group”

I create a group called FailoverSiteVMs which contains the test & dev servers.

A second group is called ProductionSiteVMs which contains the production virtual machines.

Now we need to create 2 “Hosts DRS Groups. One for the FailoverSite.

And another one for the Production site.

An overview of the configured groups

Once all the groups are created you can start creating DRS rules. Select the “Virtual Machines to Hosts” as type, the Cluster Vms Group and the Cluster Hosts Groups.

There are 2 main types of DRS rules:

Should run on hosts in group
Must run on hosts in group

The “Should run on hosts in group” rule keeps the VMs on the configured hosts but HA can violate the DRS rules and start the VMs on the failover hosts.

When the “Must run on hosts in group” type is used HA won’t violate the DRS rules and the VMs won’t be restarted on the failover hosts.

Once the rules are configured the rules dialog looks like this.

Filed under: Virtualization Tagged: DRS, DRS Affinity, vCenter, vSphere

VMware updates released

Stijn Vermoesen — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:33:40 +0000

VMware just released vSphere 4.1, Site Recovery Manager 4.1 and VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3.

What’s new in vSphere 4.1.

The downloads can be found at:

vCenter 4.1

ESX 4.1 – Release Notes

ESXi 4.1 – Release Notes

Site Recovery Manager 4.1 – Release Notes

vSphere PowerCLI 4.1

vSphere CLI 4.1

vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) 4.1

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 – Release Notes

Both vCenter 4.1 and SRM 4.1 are now only installable on 64-bit host platforms.

Filed under: Virtualization Tagged: vSphere

Virtual Center Perf Chart service encountered an internal error

Stijn Vermoesen — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:32:56 +0000

On a Virtual Center 4 update 1 installation I noticed an Perf Charts service error on the performance overview tab. The advanced performance tab is functioning as normal.

There are 3 VMware KBs related to this type of error:

Unfortunately none of these solved my problem.

In virtual center U1 the configuration of the performance charts database has changed location. It’s now located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\statsreport.xml.

VMware updated the KB article (KB1013877) in the mean time to reflect the changes in Update 1.

Posted in Virtualization Tagged: Virtual Center, VMware, vSphere