Shared IT Services Platform

Allocation: Elastic Pools of Resources

To build a true private cloud, automated workload balancing within shared pools of resources is required because it delivers optimized resource usage. This ensures that companies get full resource utilization and the highest availability as needed by application and service loads.

VMware DRS continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently aligns resources with business needs, enabling you to:

• Dynamically allocate IT resources to the highest priority applications. Create rules and policies to prioritize how resources are allocated to virtual machines.
• Give IT autonomy to business organizations. Provide dedicated 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 while giving central IT control over hardware resources.

Watch a technical video on: VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler and VMware vSphere

Live migration is required for this IT service because it must be transparent to end-users. VMware DRS is totally transparent to end-users because it uses VMware VMotion to move virtual machines within the cluster. Any other offering that attempts automated workload balancing without live migration will disrupt end-users, making the capability unusable.

Microsoft and Citrix do not have DRS. IT admins with these solutions have two options to balance their workload across the virtual environment, both of which increase complexity and cost. First, they can run their servers at lower utilization rates (i.e., more spare headroom) to accommodate spikes in usage, but this means purchasing more hardware and licenses. Alternatively, they could manually monitor each server and manually load balance VMs. This option pulls admins away from other higher value work, resulting in lower IT admin productivity and higher operational costs.

See how VMware DRS can save $40,000 per year in a 150 VM environment.

In conjunction with VMware DRS, VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and vShield Zones are also critical for enabling elastic pools of resources. vNetwork Distributed Switch provides a centralized point of control for cluster level networking and moves beyond per host network configuration in virtual environments. vShield Zones enables you to run your applications efficiently within a shared computing resource pool, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data. Neither Microsoft nor Citrix have anything comparable.

Features	VMware vSphere with vCenter	Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V with SCVMM R2	Citrix XenServer with Essentials Enterprise
Continuously Monitors Utilization Across Resource Pools
Utilizes Live Migration for Zero Downtime, Automated Load Balancing		PRO Tips is not a mature, proven technology and requires System Center Operations Manager,	Citrix WLB only makes static host placement recommendations
Hierarchical Resource Pools
Isolation Between Resource Pools
Affinity Rules
Maintenance Mode for Servers
Recommends Host for Initial Virtual Machine Placement
Maintain Virtual Network Switch Settings When VMs Live Migrate to Another Host
Manage One Virtual Switch for the Entire Cluster
Maintain Network Security Settings When VMs Live Migrate to Another Host
Enforce Network Security Settings at VM-level, Instead of at Host-level