How to Set Placement Defaults for Virtual Machines

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Use Placement Settings in Administration view to configure metrics that determine how virtual machine hosts are rated when placing a virtual machine on a host. You can customize these ratings to address the unique requirements of an individual virtual machine as you deploy or migrate the virtual machine. For more information, see How to Customize Host Ratings for a Virtual Machine.

When you deploy or migrate a virtual machine, each available host is assigned a rating of 0–5 to indicate the host's suitability for hosting the virtual machine. The host rating is based on the virtual machine's hardware and software requirements and anticipated resource usage. Host ratings also take into consideration the placement goal: either resource maximization on hosts or load balancing among hosts. The process of evaluating the suitability of hosts for a virtual machine is known as virtual machine placement. For more information, see About Virtual Machine Placement.

How to set placement defaults for virtual machines

  1. In Administration view, click Settings in the navigation pane, and then click Placement Settings in the results pane.

  2. In the Actions pane, under Settings, click Modify.

  3. In the Placement Settings dialog box, under Placement goal, select your goal in determining the most suitable host for a virtual machine:

    • Load balancing—Each host's suitability is rated based on the intent to minimize the processing load on any one host.
    • Resource maximization—Each host's suitability is rated based on the intent to consolidate multiple low-utilization workloads on a single host. Virtual machine placement in these cases involves determining the capacity limits for a particular host and placing virtual machines on that host until the limits are reached.

  4. Under Resource importance, indicate the relative importance to place on CPU utilization, available memory, disk I/O, and network utilization when placing a virtual machine.

See Also

Concepts

About Host Ratings
About Virtual Machine Placement
How to Customize Host Ratings for a Virtual Machine
How to Set Placement Options for a Host