vRA 8.x Placement Policies

In this article, we will discuss about placement policy options in vRealize Automation 8.x.

The placement policy helps vRA to determine hosts for deployments within the specified cloud zone.

At the time of creation of a new cloud zone, as shown in image below, the wizard prompts for policy option selection for placement of workloads on that cloud zone.

By default, we get only three choices Default, Binpack, and Spread as in image above. However, if you have integration with vRealize Operations, then we get one more extra choice as Advanced as in image below.

Let’s understand each of this option.

Default:

If this option is selected, the workloads are placed on random hosts. This option works at an individual machine level. For example, all machines in a particular deployment are distributed randomly across the available clusters and hosts that satisfy the requirements.

Binpack:

If this option is selected, the workloads are placed on the most loaded host provided that it has enough compute resource to run that compute.

Spread:

If this option is selected, the workloads are placed on cluster or host that has least number of VMs. Later, vSphere DRS will distribute the workloads across hosts.

For example, let’s assume you have the following configuration:

• DRS cluster 1 with 5 virtual machines
• DRS cluster 2 with 9 virtual machines
• DRS cluster 3 with 6 virtual machines

If you request a cluster of 3 virtual machines and you select a Spread policy, they should all be placed on cluster 1. The updated loads become 8 virtual machines for cluster 1, while the loads for clusters 2 and 3 remain the same at 9 and 6.

Later, if you request an additional 2 virtual machines, they are placed on DRS cluster 3, which will now have 8 virtual machines. The load for clusters 1 and 3 remain the same at 8 and 9.

Advanced:

If this option is selected, workloads are placed based on the recommendations from vRealize Operations manager.