Resource Pool Utilization?

[Ken_Cline]

Hi all,

I'm interested in finding out who among you is using resource pools to manage the capacity in your VI-3 clusters. If you could please post the answers to the following questions (whether you use resource pools or not), I'd be most appreciative

1. Please provide a brief description of your organization (i.e. Fortune 500 manufacturing / SMB retail / whatever makes sense to you)

2. Do you use resource pools in your organization?

3. What is your primary reason for using / not using resource pools?

If you do use resource pools, please answer the following:

4. What is your primary use of resource pools (resource management or delegation of admin)

5. Do you configure a Reservation for your pools?

5a: Is it an expandable reservation?

6. What percentage of your total capacity do you allocate via resource pools:

6a: Reservation?

6b: Limit?

7. Have you found resource pools to be an effective management tool (i.e. is it living up to your expectations)?

Thanks in advance to all who reply!

[kix1979 · Accepted solution]

1. Please provide a brief description of your

organization (i.e. Fortune 500 manufacturing / SMB

retail / whatever makes sense to you)

Software vendor, not sure on our Prod but this is for my area

2. Do you use resource pools in your organization?

Yes

3. What is your primary reason for using / not using

resource pools?

I use them to limit the impact of testing.

If you do use resource pools, please answer the

following:

4. What is your primary use of resource pools

(resource management or delegation of admin)

5. Do you configure a Reservation for your pools?

One per application set, so one for Exchange, one for SQL etc...

5a: Is it an expandable reservation?

Most are expandable, but a few are locked to prevent runaway processes from taking resources.

6. What percentage of your total capacity do you

allocate via resource pools:

6a: Reservation?

About 40%

6b: Limit?

No limits set

7. Have you found resource pools to be an effective

management tool (i.e. is it living up to your

expectations)?

Yes, except for when it comes to load balancing network/disk IO, and the fact it moves VMs based on contention.

Kix

[esiebert7625]

1. Please provide a brief description of your organization (i.e. Fortune 500 manufacturing / SMB retail / whatever makes sense to you)

\- Restaurant company

2. Do you use resource pools in your organization?

\- No

3. What is your primary reason for using / not using resource pools?

\- We use HA but not DRS, we do not use DRS because we have enough spare capacity on all our ESX servers to support HA failover without it. Using DRS adds additional complexity to the environment. I do configure memory and CPU limits on all our dev & test systems so they do not negatively impact the production VM's.

[Ken_Cline]

I think you would find DRS to be helpful. The combination of HA and DRS is a knockout. If you're not comfortable letting your VMs "float", then set DRS to semi-automatic mode and let it decide where to restart your failed VMs in the event of an HA event...

Just my $0.02

[esiebert7625]

I thought about it and may still end up doing it. It can definitely be a very useful feature.

[epping]

pharma company, not listed but in the top 10.

dont use reasource pools, dev vms are located on seperate hosts,

use drs and ha, cant see the point of resource pools unless u have a charging model or u have an app in a vm that some times runs away with it self. i try to keep it as simple as possible and dont see much advantage for the added complexity.

[STS]

1. Please provide a brief description of your organization (i.e. Fortune 500 manufacturing / SMB retail / whatever makes sense to you)

The company with lots of black stuff.

2. Do you use resource pools in your organization?

Yes we do

3. What is your primary reason for using / not using resource pools?

Future proofing design expectations

If you do use resource pools, please answer the following:

4. What is your primary use of resource pools (resource management or delegation of admin)

Organisational. We do use reservations or limits, we have implemented much like the folder view in VC1. We have implemented as we hope going forward resource pools are improved and we can gain performance charts at different levels.

5. Do you configure a Reservation for your pools? No

5a: Is it an expandable reservation? No

6. What percentage of your total capacity do you allocate via resource pools:

6a: Reservation? None

6b: Limit? None

we use our own model as VMware's model doesnt work. Limits mean contention and reservation means no over allocating. So we introduced flexibility.

7. Have you found resource pools to be an effective management tool (i.e. is it living up to your expectations)?

Not yet. It has potential but alot depends on your business model of how you sell resource. Perfect world they would work and maybe good dev/test model, but how to sell contention in large orgs without drivin up large opex bills can be tough. Step at a time

[P_Blackmore]

1. Please provide a brief description of your organization

Bank[/b]

2. Do you use resource pools in your organization?

Yes[/b]

3. What is your primary reason for using / not using resource pools?

Because they're there.[/b]If you do use resource pools, please answer the following:

4. What is your primary use of resource pools (resource management or delegation of admin)

I use resource groups for resource admin only. I currently permission VMs directly but I will probably use folders under "VMs and templates" for delegation of roles to groups of VMs if needed in future.[/b]

5. Do you configure a Reservation for your pools? No[/b]

5a: Is it an expandable reservation?

6. What percentage of your total capacity do you allocate via resource pools: N/a[/b]

6a: Reservation? n/a[/b]

6b: Limit? n/a[/b]

7. Have you found resource pools to be an effective management tool (i.e. is it living up to your expectations)?

Not realy. It can become very complicated and it's very easy to misconfigure and end up doing the opposite of what you intended.

eg. Say you wanted three tiers of service. Gold, Silver & Bronze. you choose the very basic option of setting the CPU and Memory shares to high medium and low respectively. Nice and simple? Not realy! Lets say you have 20 Gold VM's, 10 Silver VMs and say only 2 Bronze VMs all same spec. You end up with the following. 40 Gold VMs share 8000 shares, 10 Silver VMs share 4000 shares and 2 Bronze Vms share 2000 shares. the result is each gold server gets 200 shares, each silver server gets 400 shares and each bronze server gets 1000 shares! Not exactly what you intended![/b]