Mike,
Our approach to load balancing is to put all of our VMs inside a vCenter
cluster with dynamic resource scheduling enabled -- this allows vmware to move
VMs around to balance the load. We can then have an arbitrary number of
physical servers, but to the VCL it looks like a single vmhost. The downside of
this approach is that you need to purchase VMware's enterprise license. As
another precondition for this, your vmhosts can't use local storage for the
datastores: they must use a SAN. We also had to write our own provisioning
module to get this to work, but so far it is working very well.
Aaron
--
Aaron Coburn
Systems Administrator and Programmer
Academic Technology Services, Amherst College
(413) 542-5451 acob...@amherst.edu
On Dec 8, 2011, at 4:05 PM, Mike Haudenschild wrote:
> Hello to all. I've been tasked with building out and managing a VCL
> implementation that will utilize VMWare ESXi 4.1 hypervisors across 5
> separate servers. I have trolled the existing documentation and listserv
> archive, but I have two burning questions:
>
> 1. I've read in another thread that VCL doesn't have load balancing
> capabilities per se as part of the scheduler. How does VCL equalize the
> load of virtual machines across several hypervisors?
>
> 2. I've found that the "free" VMWare hypervisor 4.1 license caps out at one
> physical processor (with 6 cores). Are most folks running a non-free VMWare
> license alongside VCL?
>
> I greatly appreciate any assistance that current VCL users and the dev team
> can provide!
>
> Regards,
> Mike
>
> --
> *Mike Haudenschild*
> Education Systems Manager
> Longsight Group
> (740) 599-5005 x809
> m...@longsight.com
> www.longsight.com
