DRS Activity

During our troubleshooting times with AutoYaST we also had the opportunity to fiddle with the new Distributed Resource Scheduling option in VI3. While the option seems great we still haven’t got it to a point where we would be comfortable with it’s performance.

The option itself is great and really has some potential and VMotion has proved itself as well so on the technical side there are no worries. The issue we are struggling with at the moment is the way DRS decides when to move VM’s away from one machine and on to the other. Even at the most conservative setting we can’t do an installation of a VM without DRS deciding to start moving machines. During the course of our SLES installations we regularly had only the newly installing VM on one clusterserver and all the other VM’s on second because DRS decided to move them all away.

If anybody has similar experiences or tips in this area we would love to hear them.

This entry was posted on July 20, 2006 at 10:26 am and is filed under BlogPosts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “DRS Activity”

  1. canadait Says:
    August 4, 2006 at 12:34 am

    Hi,

    What about using a “swing” server for your installations. You would install the OS on this server which would not be a part of the DRS cluster. You would then VMotion the VM into your cluster. This should reduce the chances of DRS moving everything around as much.

  2. martijnl Says:
    August 7, 2006 at 12:44 pm

    Thanks for this tip. We’ll see what we can do with the hardware we save from the migration. We’ll also keep a close eye on what DRS does on the production servers.

    The first alternative would probably mean extra licensing costs or maybe we can do it with VMWare Server.

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