Defining Shares, Reservation, Expandable reservation and Limits Concepts and Best Practices in Resource Pools

Shares: defines a priority access to the resources. Providers and Consumers of Resources
You can configure it at VM level and/or Resource Pool level.
IT allows to set Shares as High, Normal, Low or Custom. Provider of Resouces: can be a Host, a Cluster or a Resource Pool.
Applies to: CPU, Memory and Disk. Consumer of Resources: Virtual Machines, Resources Pools and Clusters are consumer of resources.
One Resource Pool can be both consumer and provider of resources from and to other RPs.
Reservation: specifies a base of minimum of guaranteed resources.
They are set in Megahertz and/or Megabytes.
The VM will be powered only if there are resources to satisfy the reservation
Applies to: CPU and Memory.

Expandable Reservation: allows (if enabled) the utilization of the resources

above of reservation. Resources can be the RP or their Parent.
The parent can be a Host, a Cluster or another Resource Pool.
Its set as enabled by default.

Limit: sets the access limit CPU, Memory and Disk I/O resources.
They are defined in Megahertz, Megabytes and/or IOPS.

Using Shares, Reservation and Limits. When and why.

Use Shares when:

-The VMs will compete trying to access the resources.
-If you need to set the priorities of the VMs by relevance and/or tier.
Set the reservation when:
-You need to be compliant with a SLA Reservation vs Shares vs Limits VM Shares vs RPs Shares
-Youre working in overcommit mode, provisioning more resources than
you have
Define Limits when:
-Your are reaching the 100% of your available resources
-You want to avoid that the non-relevant VMs monopolize resources

Typical example of unbalanced shares for

having VMs outside the Resource Pool
Shares applies only to resources that are not preserved by reservation

Limits vs Expandable reservation:

-A limit defines the maximum amount of resources that can be used Keep in mind that if you disable your DRS Cluster you can
-Expandable reservation defines, if theres not any other reservation, the choice of using do a Backup of your entire Resource Pool tree
Parents Resource Pool (Host, Cluster or Resource Pool)
Shares of VMs are proportional to Shares or Resource Pools

Tracking Expandable Reservation Resource Pool program tasks

10 Tips for using Resource Pools

1 Resource Pools are NOT only VM Folders.

2 Avoid placing the VMs in the root of resources like Host and/or Cluster.
3 A reservation is a promise of resources and consume it. Even if you dont use it.
4 Avoid setting Limits and Shares at VM level. Use always Resource Pools.
5 You can schedule a task to increase or decrease RPs resources.
6 If you are using HA, a bad reservation set will be multiplied.
7 Is possible to delegate administration access of a RP and its child objects. You can schedule tasks to increase or decrease the resources in a Pool as you need
8 Consider how many VMs are into a RP when allocate Shares to it.
9 Unless you are completely sure, avoid creating RP into a RP. Copyright 2014 http://federicocinalli.com | Designed by: Federico Cinalli | Version 1.2
10 You can set specific alerts within RP level and the VMs inside it.

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