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Table Of Contents
A cluster is a group of hosts. You can create a cluster using vSphere Client, and add multiple hosts to the
cluster. vCenter Server manages these hosts’ resources jointly: the cluster owns all of the CPU and
memory of all hosts. You can enable the cluster for joint load balancing or failover. See Chapter 11
Creating a DRS Cluster for more information.
A datastore cluster is a group of datastores. Like DRS clusters, you can create a datastore cluster using
the vSphere Client, and add multiple datstores to the cluster. vCenter Server manages the datastore
resources jointly. You can enable Storage DRS to balance I/O load and space utilization. See Chapter 13
Creating a Datastore Cluster.
Resource Consumers
Virtual machines are resource consumers.
The default resource settings assigned during creation work well for most machines. You can later edit
the virtual machine settings to allocate a share-based percentage of the total CPU, memory, and storage
I/O of the resource provider or a guaranteed reservation of CPU and memory. When you power on that
virtual machine, the server checks whether enough unreserved resources are available and allows power
on only if there are enough resources. This process is called admission control.
A resource pool is a logical abstraction for flexible management of resources. Resource pools can be
grouped into hierarchies and used to hierarchically partition available CPU and memory resources.
Accordingly, resource pools can be considered both resource providers and consumers. They provide
resources to child resource pools and virtual machines, but are also resource consumers because they
consume their parents’ resources. See Chapter 10 Managing Resource Pools.
ESXi hosts allocate each virtual machine a portion of the underlying hardware resources based on a
number of factors:
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Resource limits defined by the user.
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Total available resources for the ESXi host (or the cluster).
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Number of virtual machines powered on and resource usage by those virtual machines.
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Overhead required to manage the virtualization.
Goals of Resource Management
When managing your resources, you must be aware of what your goals are.
In addition to resolving resource overcommitment, resource management can help you accomplish the
following:
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Performance Isolation: Prevent virtual machines from monopolizing resources and guarantee
predictable service rates.
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Efficient Usage: Exploit undercommitted resources and overcommit with graceful degradation.
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Easy Administration: Control the relative importance of virtual machines, provide flexible dynamic
partitioning, and meet absolute service-level agreements.
vSphere Resource Management
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