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
