I will not run SQL server to manage 3 to 5 hosts. Unfortunately, SQL 2008 is required to run SCOM.

Installing SCVMM is not that hard. Although SCVMM is not as good as Vcenter (deploying a Vm from a template takes hour) it’s not a bad software. But none of our customers will switch from Vmware to Hyper-V without some kind of DRS.

When Microsoft will add PRO pack or whatever it is to SCVMM, there we’ll go with Hyper-V if it still less expensive than Vmware. As Vmware Microsoft could have a licensing system to enable PRO pack on one software insteading of having another software to manage.

Too bad, for now we’ll stick with Vmware, a little more expensive, but so wasy to manage.

you have got to be kidding me….you call that KB a solution? I can’t believe you guys are really telling people to use the command line to change the values of a registry key in order to set affinity rules and then compare PRO Tips with DRS. Come on, you can’t be serious about it. Plus, why would anyone want to set affinity rules at the cluster level anyway, when it is much more logical to set it a the VM level since that’s what you want to control to begin with? I don’t want to think what happens the moment you have more than 2 VMs to manage that way….good luck.

Cheers

Stu

That said, SCVMM/SCOM integration was an absolute pig to set up. And having reviewed the features DRS offers, Id rather have that (DRS) than the SCVMM/SCOM setup. It seems to be trying too hard to be a solution for the wrong problem. To me it doesnt seem too complicated to have a simple application that checks the CPU usage of VMs on the host (as exposed through WMI perfomance counters already) and balance machines based on simple rules.

Unless Im missing something obvious, with SCOM I can’t keep VMs seperate for continuity, they can end up on the same host, thus if that host dies it will take out both VMs for a short time while they boot up on another host.

Hopefully, Citrix will pick up on this need and add it to Essentials for Hyper-V now that Live Migration is available.

I am not ignoring the features, I acknowledge it does much more , but it because it is a product with a much wider scope, not only virtualization management.

That’s why I say the comparison is not apples to apples.
I am not saying OpsMgr is bad, or anything like that.

So, if a customer wants to replace ESX with Hyper-V, they need a huge complex monitoring system to have workload balancing, with lots of features it may not need.

I know many customers have already their established monitoring tools (Tivoli, Unicenter, Openview, etc etc). Will they need to fully implement a complex system to have a DRS-like functionality ? Or throw away their existing systems ? This is the complexity Eric is talking about. Why not create a virtualization focused product un-tied from a huge monitoring system which requires many different components, database, etc etc ?

I think the subject here is not DRS versus PRO, but how complex is to achieve the same functionality VMware gives you.

OK, I get it now. If you ignore everything else that PRO does and just focus on the stuff that it does that is exactly the same as DRS, it’s no better than DRS?

Because PRO is leveraging information from OpsMgr, any information that OpsMgr is collecting can be used as a target for PRO tips. So there is a PRO tip that triggers on guest CPU utilisation which doesn’t move the machine (what’s the point of doing that?) but instead suggests increasing the vCPU allocated to that machine. I think you’re confusing does not with cannot – just because we don’t prompt to move the machine based on guest CPU utilisation (again, why would we do that, guest CPU util won’t get resolved by moving it – a host based tip would move the machine if that also happened to be stressing the host) doesn’t mean we can’t do that. If you had a situation where wou wanted a guest counter to trigger a migration, PRO could absolutely do that.

Cheers

Stu

What I mean is that, PRO does not move a VM based on what is happening inside of it (an SQL server problem for ex).

I agree with your statements, but we are talking about 2 different problems here. One thing is making sure the hosts are providing the best possible performance to VMs. Another thing is a bad application inside a VM, a poor sized VM, a VM related performance problem, etc etc This is something that tons of solutions exists for years with monitoring software (Tivoli, Unicenter, etc etc).

This kind of application specific monitoring is not specific to VMs. Again, we are talking about 2 different problems here. DRS is NOT designed for that.

What Eric is comparing is apples to apples: PRO with DRS, and on this point, there’s nothing that shows PRO is better in any way. Quite the opposite, Eric shows on other posts here that PRO, is not so “PRO”

Fernando – I wasn’t the one doing the comparison here, Eric was. And to your point that OpsMgr having something that is not integrated with ProTips – that is entirely what PRO provides – integration between VMM & OpsMgr. And alleviating load on a host is a good thing, but it might not solve the underlying problem – if the problem is that SQL is eating CPU wouldn’t you rather solve that than move the problem? Moving might be a good temporary solution but not a good long term solution.