manners2210
Contributor
Contributor

Resource Pool Design

Hi,

I was hoping to get some guidance on the best approach to take when designing resource pools as I've been tasked with looking at our existing ESXi 5.1 cluster to see if any improvements could be made...

Now, at the moment we have a common set of RPs which are High, Medium and Low which I now understand is not the ideal approach as this might not get us the expected results (Ref: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/02/22/the-resource-pool-priority-pie-paradox/)  what I am looking to do is guarantee some resources to a core set of VM which provide the core infrastructure - such as the domain controllers, SQL servers etc and then ensure that our development and test VMs only get a fraction of the resources.  VMs that don't fit into these two categories will all have equal rights to the hosts resources.

I understand that resource pools only come into play when there is contention for resources.  Looking at our existing setup, we are currently only running about 30% memory consumption and about 15% CPU utilization therefore my question would be is there much benefit in creating RPs in this scenario since each VM is currently getting the amount of resources it requires?  Would it be a better idea to use reservations on the VMs themselves that I have identified as core infrastructure and if so what would be the best way of identifying an appropriate reservation for CPU and Memory?  My thoughts are that I could look at the average CPU and Mem usage over the past week/month and take an average, then use that as the reservation value?    I also hope to ensure that the cluster admission control policy which is currently set to 25% for CPU/Mem (we have four hosts) accurately reflects the amount of available capacity we have.  Its currently reporting as 98% for both which I don't believe is a true reflection.  Will using reservations for VMs help with this?

Thanks in advance

Brian

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