Turbonomic

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  • 1.  Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Tue July 30, 2024 10:42 AM

    Looking for some guidance, on how I can make sure some VM's (in a group) Always stay on a given host together.

    Also, I'd like to know how to make others (also grouped) be spread among the other hosts, but never on the same one.

    We've pretty much only used Turbonomic for load balancing, and scaling actions, and would like to take advantage of more of it's features. Ideally as mentioned above if possible.

    Is there a guide on this topic? I did not find one, but it's very possible I'm searching for the wrong terminology etc...

    Thanks!



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    Tex Standridge
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  • 2.  RE: Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Tue July 30, 2024 03:32 PM

    Hi @Tex Standridge glad to hear you are using Turbonomic and want to use it for an additional use case.  In Turbonomic what you are looking to create is what we call a "Placement Policy" which is documented here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/tarm/latest?topic=policies-creating-placement you can create either "place" or "do not place" policies to achieve what you are asking.  

    Hope that helps, thanks



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    Jason Shaw
    Product Manager | Turbonomic
    IBM Software | IT Automation
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Tue July 30, 2024 05:20 PM

    Thanks for the response Jason. I have been playing with the placement policies, but what I seem to be able to do, isn't exactly what I'm trying to do.

    My goal is to move a group of VMs let's call them "Works" if the group has 3 servers Works-App, Works-SQL, and Works-Remote. I want to make sure these 3 VM's are on the same host, even if one is moved off for whatever reason.

    Adversely, I may want members of another group to never be on the same host, in the event of a host going down.

    These are options I'm certainly not seeing as available, or perhaps I'm simply building it wrong? Is this a capability? Because we were quite literally sold on that ability, despite never having set it up until now.



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    Tex Standridge
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Wed July 31, 2024 08:57 AM

    Hi Tex,

    Yes this is possible and I have used this feature before.  To keep the 3 VMs in your example on the same Host you would just use the Place policy with the VM Group and your desired Host group and make sure the 'Limit workload entities to placement group' checkbox is checked.  This will create a rule to keep the VMs in this group only on the Host(s) in your Host group.

    For the adverse (making sure each VM is never on the same host, the setting within the Place policy you are looking for is 'Limit the maximum number of workload entities per placement entity to: ' where you can then set that to 1 which will essentially tell Turbo to only allow 1 VM per Host.  Or if you wanted to only allow 2 VMs per Host you would set this value to 2, and so forth.  See the screenshot below as an example.  Hope this helps!



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    Tim Sweetz
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Wed July 31, 2024 09:42 AM
    Edited by Julio Riquelme Wed July 31, 2024 09:43 AM

    Turbonomic can do that using policies as Jason says.  IMHO, I think that might be easier to do at the vcenter level using "affinity" policies. Turbonomic ingests all policies coming from vCenter and it has account of them for recomending actions. So, at the end you can begin pondering what approach is best for each case: to keep a vCenter policy or replace it by a Turbonomic policy, what works best for that scenario (best of both worlds), just my opinion... 



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    Julio Riquelme
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Fri August 02, 2024 05:25 PM

    True, DRS Anti-Affinity Rules for VCenter can do the same thing at the Host level. Turbo offers the ability to do the same with policies in our platform though so that the same concept can be applied to alternative technologies as well (e.g. HyperV,), or alternative entity types as well (1 VM per Datastore, or 1 ContainerPod per Kubernetes Node)

    As you said, both approaches are valid ways to solve these problems, just as long as it's a VCenter target and the VMs + Hosts are in a DRS-enabled Cluster.



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    Ben Fariello
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Keeping (and preventing) VM's in a group on the same host.

    Posted Mon August 05, 2024 06:58 AM

    Another dimension to this is that you are able to drive the policy based automation in Turbonomic using tags on the VMs in vCenter if that is desired. 

    For example: Create a dynamic group based on a tag key value filter, then scope the policy to that group. When a new VM is deployed with a matching tag, it will automatically have the policy applied, if the tag value changes or the tag is removed, then the policy no longer applies to the VM. All automated just by changing the tag.

    It would take some custom scripting to tie all that together in vCenter today.



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    Simon Ravenscroft
    IBM Turbonomic Product Manager
    IBM
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    Original Message