If you’ll recall in my post “Understanding Resource Pools in VMware vSphere”, I cover the ideal of creating per VM share values to come up with a total number of shares for an entire resource pool. As an excerpt:
The trick to keeping your resource pools balanced is to work the math backwards and never, ever use the default high, normal, and low shares values. Decide the weight of your per VM shares first. Let’s say that I want my Dev/Test VMs to receive half as much share weight as Production. Instead of worrying about VMware’s default share value calculations above, create your own. Shares are an arbitrary value that just determine weight, they aren’t a magic number.
Now, knowing the per VM shares value works great for the lone wolf admin, but how do you easily communicate that to your entire team? Answer: Just tack the value on the resource pool name!
Simple and effective. Now you don’t even have to remember what the per VM shares are – when adding a VM to the pool, just read the RP name and do the multiplication.
I didn’t come up with this – kudos to Josh Doll for sharing this idea with me (and giving me permission to pass it along to you). Anything that makes administration easier is a thumbs up in my book. 🙂
