I thought I would share something I did in my vSphere design that helped with datacenter load balancing. The basic principle is have one LUN that is attached to all clusters in the VMware datacenter. With three operations I could move any VM from one cluster to another and balance overall resources at the datacenter level as well as letting DRS manage the cluster resources. This “swap” lun was also used for various purposes other than datacenter migrations such as temp space for P2Vs, simple path to decomm older hardware etc
Requirements.
- Multiple clusters
- LUN presented to all hosts in datacenter (or minimum 1 host per cluster)
- Same requirements for internal cluster migrations (CPU, network names etc)
Process to move VM to another cluster
- SVMotion to swap lun
- vMotion to Cluster x (where x is another cluster)
- SVMotion to final lun on Cluster x
I found this LUN a great tool for various needs in my design and perhaps there are others out there who will as well. Enjoy.
