Exploring vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler
When we discussed vMotion and Storage vMotion, we said that they are methods of manually balancing loads across hosts. vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) builds on this construct by enabling automatic load balancing within a cluster, which we introduced in Chapter 3, “Installing and Configuring vCenter Server,” and discussed again in Chapter 7, “Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity.”
DRS is a feature of vCenter Server and has the following two main functions:
- To decide which host in a cluster should run a VM when it is powered on, or intelligent placement
- To evaluate the load on the cluster over time and either make recommendations for migrations or use vMotion to automatically migrate VMs and balance the cluster workloads
DRS runs as a process within vCenter Server, and therefore you must have vCenter Server to use this feature. By default, DRS checks every 5 minutes (or 300 seconds...
