vROps – Intelligent Workload Placement

There is not very much information out there for the new feature Intelligent Workload Placement in vROps 6.1 and its improvements in 6.2. In this post there are some information that should help to understand what this feature does.

When reading the information in the manual it seems Intelligent Workload Placement (IWP) does the same as DRS. But this is not the case. DRS is resource scheduling within a cluster, IWP does resource scheduling within a datacenter (or custom datacenter). So IWP moves VMs between clusters. When you let IWP move VMs, it hands over the VM to DRS in the destination cluster, so IWP does not select the specific host, just the cluster.

Some notes about IWP

• New in 6.2: deep integration with DRS
  • Admission Control, Rules, Reservation, Shares, Limits, Resource Pools, …
• New Dashboard Workload Utilization
  • Includes new widget Current Object Utilization.
  • There you can select a cluster to show its current memory and CPU workload.
  • You can also select hosts and datacenters to show their utilization.
• New Action to Rebalance
  • Action available on datacenter and custom datacenter (new with vROps 6.1) level.
  • Running on Cluster level would be a job of DRS.
  • After running the action a Rebalance Plan shows up the recommendations for VM moves. You will see a list of suggested VMs to move, source and destination cluster, and a reason for suggestion.

How does it work

• Datacenter is partitioned into 3 zones
  • Underutilized zone
  • Optimal zone
  • Overutilized zone.
• Depending on workload badge, objects (clusters, hosts and VMs) get placed into these zones.
• When running a rebalance action, vROps suggests to move VMs between clusters to get clusters to optimal zone, or near to.
• Even when there are clusters just in overutilized zone (some for memory shortage, some for CPU shortage) vROps can move VMs around these clusters to bring them to optimal zone.
• To run the rebalance action, go to a datacenter object and use action menu to select Rebalance Container. Depending on the size of you environment, this can take a few minutes.