vSphere 5 has been out for about a month now and we are all really excited about some of the new features.  The internal Rutter environment has been running View and vSphere 5 for about a month now with no issues (knock on wood!).

First on the list is the long awaited storage DRS feature, which (similar to regular DRS) allows you to cluster datastores, and have VMware automatically move VMs or subsets of VMs around based on space or performance triggers that can be setup.  You are also able to set affinity and anti-affinity rules to keep VMs/VMDKs separate, which is a powerful tool for ensuring applications like SQL and Exchange are on different LUNs at least, and different storage systems altogether in some cases.  You can also tell SDRS to keep redundant VMs (Domain Controllers, Load balanced web servers, etc) on different LUNs for some added protection against certain storage failures.

How you use SDRS will really depend on what type of storage system you have under the covers, and if it's doing any sub-lun tiering on it's own (EMC FAST), or data replication.  If the array is doing it's own optimization, we are suggesting that you only move VMs around based on space metrics instead of performance, and let the array handle the performance side. As we continue to deploy vSphere 5 with SDRS, we will have some best practices from the field to share!

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For more information, please contact us at info@rutter-net.com