Is there a way to set VMs to only boot and run on 1 or 2 ESX servers?

[PTEastvale]

I am currently running vSphere 4.0 with multiple clusters in my environment. In one cluster, i have 8 ESX 4.0 hosts. Is there a way to do this now in vSphere 4.0 where you can specify, in order of preference, that VMs would boot and run on a specific ESX server in the cluster? In the DRS setting i can only be able to set to keep VMs together.

Reasoning for this:

I have a 3rd party software running but only have licenses for 5 of 8 hosts now (due to budget constraints). For these 3rd party tools to work i will need to have these VMs running only on those 5 hosts.

[FranckRookie]

Hi PTEastvale,

This feature is only available in 4.1 ( have a look at DRS Virtual Machine Host Affinity Rules in What’s New in vSphere 4.1 ).

But one solution could be creating dummy VM and using anti-affinity DRS rules as presented in this kb.

Good luck.

Regards

Franck

[PTEastvale]

Perfect. This is the exact solution i was looking for since version 3.0.x. I will upgrade my infrastructure to 4.1 soon.