If you’re looking for easy and controllable automated workload balance, look no further than vRealize Operation 6.6. VMware recently explained some of the new abilities of this latest release and what it could mean for organizations and IT administrators specifically.
Automated workload balance in vRealize Operation 6.6
VMware’s latest release of vRealize Operation comes with the ability to balance workloads across clusters and datastores. This means that instead of having one cluster filled with VMs and others with plenty of available resources, those VMs will be more equally distributed, without requiring tons of extra work from administrators.
vRealize Operation workload balance works at the datacenter level, monitoring CPU, memory, and disk space to ensure that VMs are spread out across clusters. And when it notices that clusters are out of balance, it provides recommended balance plans outlining which VMs should be moved to which clusters.
Workload balance ensures all clusters have enough resources to avoid future contention. Contention is the bane of any VI/Cloud administrator, because it means applications and users are adversely affected. — Dave Overbeek, VMware
This tool is also a bit different than other solutions such as VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which fights contention at the host level. So basically, you can use DRS to fight contention within clusters and vRealize Operation to fight contention between clusters.
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Benefits of automated workload balance
Workload balance attempts to avoid hotspots by spreading VMs across clusters and datastores to avoid certain clusters getting filled to the brim with VMs, thus leading to contention when clusters don’t have enough resources.
Contention in clusters can lead to faulty applications, negatively impacting end users and creating headaches for administrators. So the ability to avoid that issue is the major benefit of this new feature.
In addition, vRealize Operation’s workload balance is designed to work with DRS to fight contention. Where other tools may sort of fight with DRS when placing VMs, vRealize Operation works more efficiently alongside it.
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