CHAPTER 13VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler

This chapter covers VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). In the simplest case, DRS is just an automated VMotion. When DRS recognizes an imbalance in the resources used on each ESX host in a cluster, it rebalances the VMs among those hosts. Another major feature of DRS is initial placement. This allows DRS to decide where to place or power on a VM for the first time.

These two features of DRS closely integrate with VMware’s HA software. So if an ESX host crashes, say because of hardware failure, HA is in charge of detecting the crash and making sure VMs are started on other nodes in the cluster, generally on the ESX host that has the smallest load. Once HA has finished its work, DRS will ...

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