On the community forums a question was asked around Campus Clusters and pinning VMs to a specific set of hosts. In vSphere 4.0 that’s currently not possible unfortunately and it definitely is a feature that many customers would want to use.
Banjot Chanana revealed during VMworld that it was an upcoming feature but did not go into much details. However on the community forums, thanks @lamw for point this out, Elisha just revealed the following:
Controls will be available in the upcoming vSphere 4.1 release to enable this behavior. You’ll be able to set “soft” (ie. preferential) or “hard” (ie. strict) rules associating a set of vms with a set of hosts. HA will respect the hard rules and only failover vms to the appropriate hosts.
Basically DRS Host Affinity rules which VMware HA adheres to. Can’t wait for the upcoming vSphere version to be released and to figure out how all these nice “little” enhancements change our designs.
I wonder if this means stretched clusters(clusters with hosts residing in multiple locations) will now be supported? If so, I wonder what that means for SRM…
If they do this, I really hope they make it easier to implement the rules. Things like affinity/anti-affinity are already impossible to maintain. I’ve got 13 VMs that have to stay seperate and that means about 169 rules, so if they do make a pinning rule, let it be easier to config please!
Stretch clusters and software licensing are a couple use cases that come to mind.
Used to force this functionality with a networking fudge…
Only put certain VLANs (port groups) on sets of hosts within a cluster.
VMs won’t start on or vMotion to a host that doesn’t have its network.
Seemed to work, but the fantastic dVswitch turned up with its super useful configure once goodness.
Could still use standard vSwitch, but dVswitch is too good to not use.
Am looking forward to ESX 4.X. It will be nice to have more powerful affinity rules.
Hopefully the PCI compliance QSAs will find this good enough to allow trusted and untrused VMs on the same cluster (on separate hosts).
So has this been included now that 4.1 has been released?
hello!,I like your writing very so much! proportion we communicate more about your article on AOL? I need an expert on this house to unravel my problem. Maybe that is you! Taking a look forward to see you.