vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) continuously monitors utilization across vSphere servers and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines according to business needs.

• Dynamically align resources with business priorities
• Balance your computing capacity
• Reduce power consumption in the datacenter

DRS aggregates vSphere host resources into clusters and automatically distributes these resources to virtual machines by monitoring utilization and continuously optimizing virtual machine distribution across vSphere hosts.

• Dynamically allocate IT resources to your highest priority applications
• Dedicate IT infrastructure to business units while still achieving higher hardware utilization through resource pooling
• Empower business units to build and manage virtual machines within their resource pool

DRS continuously balances computing capacity in resource pools to deliver a level of performance, scalability and availability not possible with a physical infrastructure.

• Improve service levels and ensure that each virtual machine has access to appropriate resources at any point in time
• Easily deploy new capacity by redistributing virtual machines without system disruption
• Automatically migrate all virtual machines off physical servers to enable scheduled server maintenance with zero downtime
• Enable system administrators to monitor and effectively manage more IT infrastructure for improved administrator productivity

vSphere Distributed Power Management (DPM) continuously optimizes power consumption in the datacenter. When virtual machines in a DRS cluster need fewer resources, such as during nights and weekends, DPM consolidates workloads onto fewer servers and powers off the rest to reduce power consumption. When virtual machine resource requirements increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

• Cut ongoing power and cooling costs by up to 20% in the datacenter during low utilization time periods
• Automate management of energy efficiency in the datacenter

vSphere DRS (with DPM) is included in the vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus edition.

vCenter Server is required for the use of this feature.

DRS creates resource pools spanning all hosts in the cluster and applies cluster-level resource allocation policies. In addition to resource pools and resource allocation policies, DRS offers the following resource management capabilities:

When a virtual machine in a cluster is powered on, DRS places it on an appropriate host or generates a recommendation depending on the automation level you have chosen.

DRS distributes virtual machine workloads across the vSphere hosts inside the cluster. DRS continuously monitors the active workload and the available resources and performs or recommends VM migrations to maximize workload performance.

When enabled, Distributed Power Management (DPM) compares cluster-level and host-level capacity to the demand of the VMs, including recent historical demand, and can then place vSphere hosts in standby mode or power them back on as capacity needs change. DPM can also be set to simply issue recommendations for power on/power off operations.

DRS speeds up the VMware Update Manager remediation process by determining the optimum number of hosts that can enter maintenance mode simultaneously, based on current cluster conditions.

DRS redistributes VMs across vSphere hosts as needed to adhere to user-defined affinity and anti-affinity rules following host failures or hosts being placed in maintenance or standby mode.