Resource Pool 101

[lorenze89]

Hello Cool People,

I was exploring on creating  resource pool for one of our cluster to hopefully give a group of servers  enough resources needed.  Given my limited exposure and experience to this, I was hoping someone would be able to point me to right direction or shed some light on my question below.

• How do I computer how much resources should I allocate for my planned resource pool?
• What Happens if I under/over allocate resource for my resource pool?

My cluster has DRS and HA enabled with the following resources fo r 8 hosts

• total CPU resources: 254GHZ
• Total Memory: 2.25TB
• Total Processor: 96

Basically, I just want to allocate enough resources for my Lync and Exchange server through a resource pool and I just want to understand the pros and con's on doing this.

Best,

Renzo

[Sreejesh_D · Accepted solution]

Hi Renzo,

Resource Pool is a great feature, but we've to be bit careful when we enable it. Because wrong configurations will affect the performance of VMs.

Idea is simple, Cluster is the Master resource pool with all available physical resources. So if you want to allocate a part of it to few VMs you can spin a resource pool and reserve required CPU and Memory to the new resource pool. By this we can ensure the VMs in newly created (child) resource pool receive the required CPU and Memory resources always.

The section 'Why Use Resource Pools?' in following best practice guide will give you better understanding on Resource pool and pros and cons of it.

http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmware-drs-white-paper.pd...

[lorenze89]

Hi Yezdi,

Thanks for the response and I will definitely check the link you provided.  What concerns me is  the configuration and making sure that this won't affect  the VM's on my cluster. Is there an article somewhere that explains the computation on how much resources is need on a resource pool versus the amount of VM servers that it can handle?

Thanks!

[Sreejesh_D]

vRealize Operation Manager provides the recommendation on resource required based on analyzing statistics for a period.

[Sreejesh_D]

Here is a nice article on balancing resource pool.

[Sreejesh_D]

http://wahlnetwork.com/2012/02/01/understanding-resource-pools-in-vmware-vsphere/

[lorenze89]

Thanks yezdi, I'll check this out.