The release of VMware Inc.’s vSphere 5 brings many exciting new features and enhancements to the virtualization platform, especially when it comes to storage. Two of the biggest new features in that area are Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Profile-Driven Storage, which provide some much-needed control over storage resources.
In previous versions of vSphere, Distributed Resource Scheduler balanced VM workloads based on CPU and memory resource utilization. Storage DRS extends this capability to storage, enabling intelligent VM initial placement and load balancing based on storage I/O and capacity conditions within a cluster. Profile-Driven Storage, for its part, ensures that VMs are placed on storage tiers based on service-level agreements (SLAs), availability, performance and capabilities of the underlying storage platform. In this tip, we’ll examine both Storage DRS and the storage profile functionality in detail.
Storage DRS
Similar to the traditional DRS feature, Storage DRS uses a new type of cluster called a data store cluster, which is a collection of data stores that are aggregated into a single unit of consumption. By controlling all of the storage resources, Storage DRS allows intelligent placement of VMs that are powered on, as well as the shifting of workloads from one storage resource to another when needed to ensure optimum performance and avoid I/O bottlenecks. What this means in simpler terms is that, similar to vMotion’s movement of VMs from host to host, VMs can now be moved from data store to data store as well; the decision to move a VM from one data store to another is made by Storage DRS, which tells Storage vMotion to make the move.
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