VMworld 2015 Europe: INF5306 - DRS Advancements in vSphere 6, Advanced Concepts, & Future Directions

As the scale, performance and agility of the modern Data Center evolve to new heights, DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) the flagship feature of vSphere is playing central role in VMware’s SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) vision to transform how the virtual infrastructure is managed. DRS, the most trusted and widely deployed workload scheduler in the enterprise data center, is helping the admins to achieve unparalleled operational efficiency through automated workload placement, load-balancing of cluster to adopt to changing workload and providing efficient evacuation capabilities to reduce the downtime during maintenance and upgrades. In vSphere 6.0, many enhancements are introduced to DRS to make it even more effective during initial placement and remediation by including constraints such as network reservation and awareness to latency sensitive VMs as part of its scheduling decisions. New capabilities are added to support initial placement during cross-VC vMotion and xvMotion. In this session, DRS R&D team will provide an insight into these new features and also introduce some of the advanced options that will allow admins to customize the DRS scheduler to meet their unique business needs related to application licensing and availability. Next, some of the advanced concepts related to Resource Pools, Affinity/Anti-affinity rules, Resource Controls, Cost-Benefit analysis, and factors/constraints that influence DRS decisions will be shared. These concepts will help you to avoid some of the common pitfalls and become a power-user to get the best out of DRS scheduler. Lastly, some of the forward looking capabilities from the DRS Labs such as Analytics based initial placement, VM availability assessment through “what-if” analysis, Pro-Active evacuation based on hardware health, and Hybrid scheduler capable of seamless burst to vCloud Air will be discussed. Visibility to these future vSphere capabilities will provide you a head start for your future Data Center planning.