SDRS and Independent disks.

[easy_john]

Global: How to enable SDRS move Independent disks on vSphere appliance 6.x

- For some reason, we create all VM with one independent-persistent disk.

- We'd like to "keep .vmdk disks together".

In that case StorageDRS can't do his work, create some recommendation and migrate disks from one volume to another (all VM contains independent disk, and sdrs unable to move independent disks).

There was a cheat for vSphere 5.x - "a vpxd.cfg option sdrs.disableSDRSonIndependentDisk. When specified and set to false, Storage DRS will move independent disks" (q) SDRS Interview Questions | Virtual Reality

> Note: This will work only for non-shared independent disks.

Yes, that's ok, we don't have shared independent disks at all.

But in vSphere appliance 6.x format of vpxd.cfg file is changed, now it's xml-like.

And I still can't find how we can enable this option.

Please help.

[easy_john · Accepted solution]

Ok, after a bunch of tests I found, which constructions should work.

Need to insert in to  /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg before "</config>" next lines:

  <sdrs>

    <disableSDRSonIndependentDisk>false</disableSDRSonIndependentDisk>

  </sdrs>

and then restart vmware-vpxd service (warning, you lost connection to vcenter in this moment).

At least, before I got in /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log:

2016-05-11T15:10:41.449Z info vpxd[7F86C02C2700] [Originator@6876 sub=drmLogger opID=task-internal-2-73cbac2a-d5] CreateDrmDisksForVm: vm ${VM-name} device 2002 SDRS DISABLED for independent

for every VM, every SDRS run.