Vsphere 5.0 agent vm

[td_sk]

Thanks all,

   What is the use of agent vm in 5.0. What is the best practice of configuring it.

Thanks

siv

[depping · Accepted solution]

An agent virtual machine is a virtual machine which performs a specific function for the virtual infrastructure. An example of an agent VM would for instance be a vShield Endpoint appliance which is an anti-virus solution. By "tagging" this virtual machine as an agent VM we ensure that this virtual machine gets powered on first in the case of a host failure. We do this to ensure the service is available before all other VMs start.

This is the current order:

• Agent virtual machines
• FT secondary virtual machines
• Virtual Machines configured with a restart priority of high,
• Virtual Machines configured with a medium restart priority
• Virtual Machines configured with a low restart priority

[pdp2shirts]

I can not find any official documentation on this feature. I have searched through all of the vSphere 5.0 U1 documentation listed on the vSphere documentation webpage for the word "agent" and found no mentions of the Agent VM settings. I've searched the VMware site for agent VM and found only two community posts that reference it (This is one of those community forum posts). Google didn't get me much more info on it either. I found several blogs that mentioned this as a new feature in vSphere 5, and links to your yellow-bricks blog post which seems to be a copy of this answer.

Can you point me to documentation? I'm interested in what the configuration options for datastore and network affect. Also interested in how one designates a VM as an Agent VM. Are there .ovf metadata that can be set to designate a VM as an Agent VM?

Paul Pindell

[depping]

Agents VMs are described in the following document:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-ext-solutions-50.pdf