How to get multiple ESX share the resources on multiple servers

[amitgupta]

I lead a team of around 10 Technical consultants. I recently bought 3 servers with the intention to install ESX on them and let my team use VM images on them to do their learning and testing.

My question is:

Is there any way we can pool the resources of all 3 machines together as one single ESX and then allocate the resource to individual machines uploaded by consultants? My intention is to maximizse the resource usage by creating one pool of resorces rather than going for 3 dffferent ESX servers with their indivual pools.

Any guidance on this much appreciated.

[AWo]

Welcome to the forums!

I hope I understand your question right.

No, it i snot possible to summarize RAM of all ESX hosts to one big RAM pool, for example. Each virtual machine is running on one ESX host. It only can use the ressources (CPU, network and disk I/O bandwith, memory) provided by that single host.

But the ESX hosts can be connected together as a cluster. That means they can work together to optimize the load ans ressource sharing across all ESX hosts for the virtual guests and for availability. For example, DRS (Dynamic Ressource Sharing) monitors the load on the ESX hosts and when it figures out that one host gets overloaded it can move a virtual guest to another ESX hosts while it is online (no interrupt). Thereby it equals and optimizes the ressource usage/load across your ESX server farm.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

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[amitgupta]

Thanks AWo for your prompt reply.

Are there any documents I can use to configure DRS and to know how to configure ESX server farm?

TIA for all the help I can get here.

[AWo]

Of course, latest edition 4.1, I guess: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-esx-4-1/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

You'll find the installation and configuration tasks described there as well as description on how it works.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

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[amitgupta]

Thanks!! Its a great help!