Check out OZ VMS dot com's latest article, Overview of VMWare DRS - Distributed Resource Scheduler.

Overview of VMWare DRS - Distributed Resource Scheduler

VMWare DRS is a new technology that will automatically move Virtual Machines around your cluster of ESX 3.0 servers to their optimal location based on complex rule sets and user defined resource pools by utilising VMotion technology. This article will provide an overview of the technology and allow you to make an informed decision on the benefits DRS can provide to you and your business.

VMWare DRS is one of two enabling technologies from VMware in Virtual Infrastructure 3 that removes hardware dependancies and allows hardware to be assigned as a pool of resources to virtual machines. The other one of course is VMWare HA or High Availability and we will have another article on that one soon. It allows businesses to leverage their hardware to maximum possible utilisation, allocate high priority applications preference to hardware, and dynamically allocate hardware from the user defineable resource pool. You can also reduce downtime by letting DRS automatically reassign machines to other resources when a host is put in maintenance mode. New capacity can be added to the resource pool on the fly and the virtual machines can then take immediate advantage of the new hardware resources!

There are some basic configurable options in VMWare DRS. These include configurable automation levels of Manual, Partial and Full. Manual only recommends the inital startup host and the migrations, Partial will choose the startup host and recommend the migrations, while Automatic will automate the startup host and migrations. The old resource controls are still there from previous versions, with shares for weighting and min/max assignments.

To read the entire article, check it out, here.