VMware Resource Pools: Paying for Resources

Resource Pools have been great tools to manage resources for large companies where each department was used to buying their own resources but was forced to move to a shared resources model. In this case, each department was accustomed to purchasing their own servers that the IT Department managed. In the new model, all servers were virtualized onto the same hardware, and each department was charged for the CPU, RAM, and other resources they expected to use. The managers of the departments wanted some assurance that they would be provided with the resources for which they paid.

For example, large company with dozens of departments needed to address this challenge. The HR Department paid four times as much for IT as the Sales Department. Naturally, HR expected to obtain four times as many resources. IT created two resource pools, one for each of these departments, where the CPU and RAM Reservation of the HR pool was configured to be four times the corresponding values of the Sales Pool. Additionally, IT decided to configure Limits on each department’s resource pool to ensure they could not access more CPU and RAM than for which they paid.

Fundamentally, this approach is similar to what VMware vCloud Director does for tenants in a cloud driven by vCloud and vSphere. It automatically creates resource pools for each tenant and applies appropriate resource control settings. It also includes a chargeback feature to charge customers for what they actually used. For vSphere environments that do not have vCloud or other chargeback systems, manually configuring resource pools can be very effective, as it was for this healthcare company.

Reproduced from Global Knowledge White Paper: Recommended Use of Resource Pools in VMware vSphere DRS Clusters

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