A one month long Virtual Infrastructure poll wrapped up over on the VMware VMTN Community forums and produced some intuitive findings. The poll results reflect that the majority of respondents are not using or not effectively utilizing VMware Resource Pools. Myself included. To tell the truth, I have the resource pools set up (shares configured only, no reservations or limits), but we’re not pushing the virtual infrastructure hard enough for them to provide the benefit they were designed to deliver which is guaranteed resource allocation and resource allocation weighting in a heavily used infrastructure where there is resource contention.
What does this mean? In my case, and I’ll go out on a limb and suspect much of the same is true in other environments, the virtual infrastructure isn’t filled to the capacity that it was designed to handle. More virtualization is needed.
A link to the poll:
I agree that resource pools were designed for overcommitted environments. It was more important back in the ESX 2.x and earlier implementations when the goal was maximum VM to host ratio. Once ESX Clusters were introduced with ESX 3.0 it was no longer about squeezing as many VMs on to a host as possible
@rbrambley I’m not sure VM to host ratio priority changed between versions of ESX. ESX3 gave us clusters and DRS which automates the distribution of load evenly, but I think one of the primary goals of virtualization continues to be maximizing the utilization of hardware in the datacenter while maintaining enough resource availability for N+1.