Virtual Infrastructure Automation: A Step-by-Step Process
Step 1: Configure your IT environment for VMotion
Before you can enable live migration of virtual machines, you must first configure your virtual environment for VMotion. One requirement is to implement shared storage such as a Fibre Channel/iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) in your virtual infrastructure. Doing so will dramatically accelerate the process of migrating virtual machines. You will also want configure your ESX hosts to use the VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) so they can access the same shared storage files simultaneously.
Step 2: Place ESX Hosts in a DRS Cluster
As one of the new capabilities of VMware Infrastructure, clusters are collections of ESX hosts and associated virtual machines with shared resources and a shared management interface. Add a managed host to a cluster by selecting the host in VirtualCenter Server and drag it to the target cluster object. If you do not have a pre-existing cluster, VirtualCenter provides a New Cluster wizard to take you through the steps of creating a new cluster.
Step 3: Determine DRS Policies & Settings
After you have created a cluster, you can enable it for DRS and proceed to add or remove hosts, and to customize the cluster in other ways. You can customize a DRS cluster by specify the automation level and migration threshold during cluster creation, adding hosts to the cluster or by setting custom automation levels for individual virtual machines in your cluster. You can also group virtual machines by using “affinity” and “anti-affinity” rules, which specify that selected virtual machines should always be placed on the same host, or on different hosts.
