Design Question

[fitzie22]

I have been working with VMware now for about 5 years and have always had separate qa and production clusters. Now with the power or the hosts we are getting adn teh expense of licensing I have changed my way of thinking. I am thinking of VMware now as more as a Business Service in that I will controll through folders and resource pools under one cluster.

Now management is not as easily sold in that they are not too keen on having qa and prod living on the same host in that what if the qa server takes all the resources. Now there is the option of turning DRS off and manually moving vm's arround to keep them separate but to me that defeats the purpose of what I am trying to accomplish.. I know somw of you will say that why not 2 clusters adn the reason is that I would have have a 2 clusters with 2 hosts each with over 50% utilization on eace and mainteneance and HA would not work. Thoughts sugestions would be appreciated,

[timparkinsonShe]

I don't see why collapsing the two and using resource pools would be an issue. Limit the dev/qa resource pools if you like, or certainly put them on lowered shares values.

[RParker]

Besides what Tim said, management is severely mistaken ( a very common occurrence since they don't actually USE products, everything with managers is "hypothetical). Also they hired you to do a job, they should let you do it.

And for the biggest reason is you can EASILY test it.. pools control the resource, period. Don't care if they are ALL on one server or not. You put the VM's in pools, limit how much resource they get, and they will NOT exceed the limit, period end of subject.