In my role as a Technical Account Manager (TAM), I get to work with highly skilled engineers and architects at our customers and partners that put VMware’s products to great use in their datacenters. And even though I am pretty used to all the positive impact these products deliver, I still enjoy seeing the long-term benefits of vSphere happening every day.
One of the examples I’d like to share today is the usage of VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). This technology has been introduced more than six years ago and still plays a key role to the core virtualization infrastructure. DRS automates the migration process vMotion to load-balance virtual machines across ESXi hosts in a vSphere Cluster.
Last year, the DRS fans and bloggers Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping even came up with a great t-shirt design for VMworld:
“Run DRS” – this is exactly what a customer of mine is doing with huge success. They were so kind to send me a screenshot of one of their vSphere clusters including the current amount of vMotion processes (initiated by DRS) that happened in the past 1.5 years:
More than 18.000 vMotions in one vSphere Cluster. In less than 1.5 years. That’s roughly 30 vMotions per day. It’s hard to imagine what the datacenter operations team would do without this. But they implemented a well-designed architecture and benefit from the flexibility of this technology every day. Do you?