Description:

Virtual machine storage provisioning historically has imposed operational challenges. Monitoring datastore capacity and I/O load has proven to be very difficult and as a result is often neglected. During the provisioning process for virtual machines, virtual disk datastores are often randomly selected, leading tohot spots and over- or underutilized datastores. VMware vSphere® Storage DRS was a new feature introduced in VMware vSphere 5.0 that provides smart virtual machine placement and load-balancing mechanisms based on I/O and space capacity.This technical paper covers the five key features that vSphere Storage DRS offers; Resource aggregation, Initial placement, Load balancing, Affinity rules and Datastore maintenance mode in great detail.