Hi guys.
I was wondering how I could balance out VMs over 8 production hosts that have similar CPU clocks and cores but 5 of have 113GB of RAM and 3 that have 190GB RAM.
DRS seems to balance out the CPU loads fine but I am seeing that the 3 higher cpu hosts have 30% of RAM utilised, while the 5 older hosts have 70%.
Does vCenter 4.1 have issues with different spec'd hosts and is this improved in vSphere 5 ?
Thanks in advance for any pointers or info.
If DRS sees the cluster as balanced it will do no more. You can check the summary tab of your cluster and looks a the VMware DRS chart. If you're in the green DRS is doing it's job. With that said, you can try to set your migration threshold a bit more aggressive or manually balance the cluster yourself using vMotion
Thanks for that Troy. I thought this would be the case.
Do you know if vCenter 5 has a different way of distributing ? I know I can set up rules to place the high RAM/low CPU (if there is such a thing) servers on the higher RAM hosts to balance it a bit myself, but I was just wondering if there was another way.
Thanks
vCenter 5 and DRS will not make that much of a difference as far as DRS is concerned. You're best bet is to manually balance the load if setting your migration threshold more aggressive doesn't work.
no vcenter works the same way - DRS's purpose is to insyre that each VM is receiving the necessary resources not to make the sam number if VMs or the same amount of CPU/Memory is being used on each hosr in the cluster -