• This topic has 4 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated August 28, 2019 by Praveen S.

ZSSP and ZORGs with vSphere

  • Praveen S
    August 27, 2019 08:35:19 AM
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    Hello,

    Will try to post it on the new forum as I did not get answers on the old one 🙂

    I was wondering if there is actually anyone out there using ZORGs along with vSphere?

    The issue that I have here is that if you use ZORGs you have to map resource pools to the ZORGs.

    However it is well known that using resource pool is not a neutral thing in case of contention (i.e. the share values mandatory to the resource pools settings have a huge impact in terms of resource access competition, https://jeffejohnson.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/resource-pools-vs-folders/ this articles explains it clearly).

    As a CSP, it does mean that each time a customer would add a VM to a resource pool, we’ll have to re-calculate the share value to keep the fairness between customers which is not operationally suitable.

    So from my point of view, it is actually really hard to use ZORGs with vSphere. Is there anybody out there using this feature and how this issue is overcome?

    Thanks,

    Sevan

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    Santhosh D
    August 27, 2019 02:38:11 PM

    Hello Sevan,

     

    Mike from Zerto here. Are you using vCloud Director or regular vCenter?

    Matt B
    August 27, 2019 06:07:09 PM

    We use vSphere/ZORGs  in 2 different ways, although the vast extent of our Zerto clients are in VCD.

    We use resource pools per customer, but they have no prioritization, shares, etc.  Customers have the option of  creating child resource pools that do have share, if they want to put cost limits on. However, in general, our resource pools are for tracking usage for billing, not for prioritization.
    Re: Zerto, for the self-service customers that have ZSSP access, we go the route of assigning  resourcepools, datastores, networks, etc to the ZORG.
    But, as I mention, theres no priority involved.
    For purely managed customers, where we do all operations for them ourselves, as opposed to them having access to our cloud portal, (and also they do not have ZSSP access), we do not allocate them to the ZORG, as any operation would be done at us at the system level. This does give us warnings about resources not in ZORG, but we have not seen any functional issue.

    Note, this is for DR between our datacenters. For customer-premise replicating to us, it goes into VCD.
    Hope this helps some

    -Different Mike S

    Santhosh D
    August 27, 2019 06:19:59 PM

    Hello Mike,

    Thanks for clarifying. Per page 109 of our Zerto Cloud Manager Administration Guide:

    “Resource Type: The type of resource: Datastore, Network, or Resource Pool. You must have a resource pool in the list of
    resources, since all recovery of VPGs, when the recovery site is defined in Zerto Cloud Manager, is to a resource pool.
    Note: If DRS is disabled for the site, later on all resource pools are removed by VMware and the recovery of affected VPGs
    to this site is halted until new resource pools are defined and assigned to Zerto organizations in Zerto Cloud Manager and
    then to all the VPGs.”

    Hope this helps.

     

    Praveen S
    August 28, 2019 07:36:18 AM

    Thnaks for your replies.

    We use vSphere. With vCD, the problem does not happen as this is one of the actual purpose of vCD to manage those resource allocation values.

    How do you do to not have the share value coming into account? I do agree with you that you don’t have to put any reservation / limits, however the share value always come into account. Even if you let it as default, it would still have an impact in case of contention: let’s assume you have 2 customers, one having one VM and the other having two, even if you let the default share value, the one with 2 VMs will have twice less ressource due to the fact that both RP would have the same share value. If you would be willing to have the fairness kept, you would need to double the share value of the RP that has 2 VMs in it.

    Hence you need to recalculate the share value each time a new VM is added which add some scripting efforts.

    FYI, I’ve checked with VMWare, there is no way to put a value of 0 or -1 to a share value that would make it behave exactly as a folder (i.e. no impact at all)

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