Chapter 4. Resource and vCenter Management
Resource management is key in any virtualized environment. In the context of VMware ESXi and vSphere, resource management includes clustering, HA, and the DRS. This chapter takes a look at the available technologies and how they work together to help you manage your environment effectively. We’ll explore:
- vSphere clusters
Clusters within the ESXi environment allow you to pool multiple physical ESXi hosts to create a virtual pool of resources from the combined resources of all of the ESXi hosts. The three main elements of VMware clustering are the DRS, fault tolerance, and HA.
- vSphere HA
This provides you with a cost-effective and intelligent engine that can provide high availability within your ESXi cluster. For example, if you have a four-node cluster and one node in the cluster goes down, you can configure HA to automatically start up the virtual machines from the failed node on any remaining node that has available resources.
- vSphere DRS
The DRS actively monitors all virtual machines in a cluster and manages their resources. DRS can be configured to provide you, the administrator, with guidelines on which virtual machines can benefit from being moved to another host. You can also configure DRS to automatically take care of the migration through vMotion.
In this chapter we will discuss various aspects of these technologies and how to configure, set up, and maintain resources in vCenter.