Host in cluster moves vm's off it even tho it's not stressed

[Kahonu84]

Aloha,

I have a brand new cluster with (4) new Dell 750s. They are called esx4/5/6/7. I have a bit of OCD about

keeping memory balanced withing a cluster (I am DRS on steroids). I can have the cluster balanced when

I go home. The next morning I see that many VMs have migrated off of esx7. The cluster is under no stress

with CPU or RAM. If I balance esx4/5/6 and leave esx7 low usage, nothing moves. DRS is set to 1 click above

most conservative. Any ideas what may be going on??

Mahalo,

           Bill

[DCasota]

Hi,

Why not perform a health check ? If your company is eligible to register your environment to Skyline, you easily get advisories from Skyline Health.

Have you seen the 4sysops.com article from Vladan Seget ? Good read, see https://4sysops.com/archives/vmware-vsphere-7-drs-scoring-and-configuration .

In addition, RVTools from https://www.robware.net is a good & free onpremise tool to check if the vSphere (cluster) settings are okay and if the four host are same hardware + configured with same settings.

Btw. regularly performing a failover&failback of virtual machines by drs vm-host affinity + anti-affinity rules is a good performance measure tecnique. If a failback hangs, you should check the drs action history logs as well.

Hope this helps.

[aakibdawood]

Is DPM enabled?

It could be that DRS is trying to evacuate ESX7.

[depping]

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@Kahonu84 wrote:

Aloha,

I have a brand new cluster with (4) new Dell 750s. They are called esx4/5/6/7. I have a bit of OCD about

keeping memory balanced withing a cluster (I am DRS on steroids). I can have the cluster balanced when

I go home. The next morning I see that many VMs have migrated off of esx7. The cluster is under no stress

with CPU or RAM. If I balance esx4/5/6 and leave esx7 low usage, nothing moves. DRS is set to 1 click above

most conservative. Any ideas what may be going on??

Mahalo,

           Bill

---

Why do you even care? Why not just let DRS do it's thing and sort things out for you? What is the actual problem, besides your OCD 😄

[DCasota]

Concerning your fears, embrace the multi-cloud approach and start brokering company's information technology demand. Avoid rank growth. Plan multi-cloud sites + network + services based on a multi-year governance plan. In addition to services sla costs, product carbon footprinting is an important kpi, too.

When it comes to the edge datacenter, in esxi release 8 you can monitor energy and carbon emissions. Btw. every esxi release had a sort of 'drs on steroids' scenario.

If the new cluster with four Dell 750 esxi hosts is part of a bigger environment, your company could consider https://www.vmware.com/professional-services/multi-cloud.html and https://blogs.vmware.com/learning/2022/05/27/what-to-expect-from-multi-cloud-academy/ . If it's a standalone cluster, see talent reskilling in https://www.vmware.com/cloud-economics.html and e.g. VMware Cloud on DELL TCO Calculator.

[Kinnison]

Hi,

Please, let's not say that resorting to the cloud / multicloud is the solution to all problems, because that's not always true, not even in economic terms.
We want to tell ourselves that with ESXi 8.0 the monitoring of "energy and carbon emissions" works, and based on what? According to monitoring the power consumption of several of my virtual machines it is now exactly "equal to zero", which is clearly a "far-fetched value" because, for the very same virtual machines, before it was also measured in tens of KW..

Regards,
Ferdinando