Storage DRS

With vSphere 5.0 VMware cane up with the “Storage DRS” which was used to move VMDK file from one datastore to another with a Datastore Cluster. With this there are few more feature and pre-requisites which are inline in this article.

It is a new way providing virtual machine placement and load balancing based on I/O capacity and Storage space. DRS is a cluster for compute while SDRS is for Storage it proactivity makes recommendation to avoid imbalance in cluster from both space utilization and latency perspective.

Feature or the Benefits of SDRS are:

• ·         Capacity planning.
• ·         Load balancing.
• ·         Datastore maintenance mode.
• ·         Affinity & Anti-affinity rules
• ·         Initial Placement

Requirement for SDRS:

• ·         Datastores which are shared across multiple datacentres are not allowed.
• ·         NFS and VMFS cannot be used in the same Datastore cluster.
• ·         Replicated and Non-replicated Datastore can not be combined in Storage DRS.
• ·         All Host must be ESXi 5.0 or later.

Storage DRS provides a new abstraction to the administrator, that is knows datastore cluster which allows administrators to put together a set of datastores into a single cluster and use that as the unit for several management operations.