In its basic form Storage DRS can be used together with any array, however there are a few combinations of Storage array features and Storage DRS features that don’t mix easily. One of the most sought after question is can Storage DRS work with Array based Auto-tiering? And the answer is yes, yes you can [...]

Lately I have received many questions about the interoperability between HA and affinity rules of DRS and SDRS. I’ve created a table listing the (anti-) affinity rules available in a vSphere 5.0 environment. Technology Type Affinity Anti-Affinity Respected by VMware HA DRS VM-VM Keep virtual machines together Separate virtual machines No VM-Host Should run on [...]

Recently an interesting question was raised about what happens if enough free space is available in the datastore cluster but not enough space is available per datastore during placement of a virtual machine. This scenario is often referred as a defragmented datastore cluster. The short answer is that if not enough space available on any [...]

Somebody asked me if VMFS3 multi-extents datastores are supported in a datastore cluster. Although they are supported and fully operational in Storage DRS, one must ask if this construct of large datastores should be used in a datastore cluster. Resource aggregation and flexibility Storage DRS Datastore clusters offer flexibility in adding and removing datastores dynamically [...]