Creating VM Rules

[BrianDougherty]

Good Afternoon,

we have a host that has been problematic, we think we finally got it figured out.

Before we put it back into production, we want to setup a rule so that only a few test servers can live on it.

Example: I have 10 servers.

I want to put servers 1-4 on this host, but make sure that server 5-10 do not land on that host.

Thought being if the host goes belly up again, those servers can be disconnected or unavailable without us having an outage.

we have 32 hosts with HA enabled.

Thank You

Brian Dougherty

[TheBobkin · Accepted solution]

Hello Brian,

You could create VM DRS Groups and Host DRS Groups and set affinity/anti-affinity for the VMs e.g. have the problem host in its own group with the VMs you want to run on it set to 'Must run' on this group (which only has this host in it) and then all other VMs with a rule for 'Must Not run' on this hosts Group:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/com.vmware.vsphere.resmgmt.doc/GUID-0591F865-91B5-4311...

Alternatively simpler options would be to temporarily set DRS to Manual and vMotion only the VMs you want to this host.

Another option would be to take this host out of the cluster altogether so nothing can be vMotioned off/onto it by DRS or restarted here by HA, register/vMotion the VMs you want to this host and do your tests/checks.

Bob

[vijayrana968]

There is affinity/anti-affinity rules option but you have to enable DRS on cluster for that.