how to balance load at vm start among hosts and VDI best practices

[meddle2010]

Couple of dumb questions.  I have two hosts and when VMs start they don't balance between the hosts.  What do I have to do to enable this?  I don't want DRS and automatic moving of VMs at this time, I just want them to balance when they start.

Also, for VDI, where you have many desktops starting up, I would assume best practice would be to disable DRS?   What I don't want happening is having a lot of desktops starting up and then the cluster being killed by DRS activity.  For this reason, do people usualy separate desktop clusters from server clusters?

thnx

[weinstein5]

DRS is what you want to insure the VMs are getting the resources needs for starte - Remember DRS will not evenly distribute VMs between nodes it functions to ensure that the VMs will receive sufficient resources - DRS would be the way to insure sufficient resources for the VMs to start in the partially automated and fully automated mode the ESXi host with the most resources is slected for the VM to start -

Typically you will want seperate clusters for virtual dekstops and servers and whether you configure your environment like this or you use a shared cluster relying on resource pools you will want to enable DRS -

[meddle2010]

Thanks for the  information!

PS.  Other what you've already mentioned here, are there any other recommended changes you'd say to make on the cluster that does VDI?  I'll be setting it to Partial automation only.

[jocoll75]

Hey meddle2010meddle2010,

     I was wondering if you were able to figure out how to balance your hosts during VM start ups. I wasn't able to find much information on this subject. Please let me know if you were able to make any head way with this issue.

Thanks,

J

[npadmani]

as weinstein5 explained in one of the earlier post.

Go with DRS, it will do the job for you.

as it looks after Initial Placement of VMs and also vMotion migrations in case of load imbalance.

if you are worried about many vMotion migrations, adjust DRS migration threshold as per you need, along with that DRS is also capable to work in Fully Auto, Partial Auto or Manual mode.

More About DRS

VMware vSphere: Hot & Cold Migration - DRS - YouTube

https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_drs_wp.pdf

Best practices for Horizon View

VMware KB: VMware Horizon View Best Practices‌