VM affinity to other VMs in cluster?

[sphinx99]

In an ESX cluster, where vmware is moving VMs around from one machine to another to balance load, is there a way to tell ESX that a particular pair of VMs should always be moved together or not at all?

I have two VMs (must be separate) which exchange quite a bit of high-bandwidth network traffic between each other. When they are on the same box vmxnet3 seems to do its magic. When they drift to separate nodes in the cluster, all that traffic goes over much slower GbE interconnects. All nodes in the cluster can handle these two VMs together. I would like them to stick together, but they seem to drift apart.

 

[NetJunkie]

Yes, DRS Rules. You can set affinity between VMs in DRS settings on the cluster.

 

[lopoetve]

In an ESX cluster, where vmware is moving VMs around from one machine to another to balance load, is there a way to tell ESX that a particular pair of VMs should always be moved together or not at all?

I have two VMs (must be separate) which exchange quite a bit of high-bandwidth network traffic between each other. When they are on the same box vmxnet3 seems to do its magic. When they drift to separate nodes in the cluster, all that traffic goes over much slower GbE interconnects. All nodes in the cluster can handle these two VMs together. I would like them to stick together, but they seem to drift apart.

them being on the same node is why it's fast then, not VMXnet3 - all virtual network adapters will exchange information at bus speed if the two vms are on the same vswitch/same host. Even the old vlance crap!