Workload Optimization in focuses on intelligently balancing and optimizing workloads across your virtualized infrastructure. The goal is to ensure that resources are distributed efficiently to maintain optimal performance, prevent resource contention, and make the best use of available hardware resources.

Using Workload Optimization, you can rebalance virtual machines and storage across clusters, relieving demand on an overloaded individual cluster and maintaining or improving cluster performance. You can also set your automated rebalancing policies to emphasize VM consolidation, which potentially frees up hosts and reduces resource demand.

Workload Optimization further allows you to potentially automate a significant portion of your data center compute and storage optimization efforts. With properly defined policies determining the threshold at which resource contention automatically runs an action, a data center performs at optimum.

Starting with version 8.6, you can run workload optimization on a custom data center which has clusters aross multiple data centers within a single vCenter Server instance. The prequisite for this is that the hosts in the different clusters must be under the same network. This means that the port groups must be the same across the data centers. You can activate cluster level optimization across data center boundaries by enabling the setting in the business intent workspace.

VMware Aria Automation Integration

When you add an instance to a VMware Aria Automation adapter or solution pack as well as to a vCenter Server adapter instance that is connected to the VMware Aria Automation server, using VMware Aria Automation-managed resources, VMware Aria Operations automatically adds a custom data center for the vCenter Server, using VMware Aria Automation-managed resources.

On the VMware Aria Operations side, to get the day2 chain configured, you must make the following initial configurations:

  1. In vCenter Server, Administration -> Solutions and then add the VMware vSphere adapter instance for the vCenter Server that is configured as an endpoint in VMware Aria Automation Server.
  2. In vCenter Server, Administration -> Solutions and then add the VMware Aria Automation adapter instance for the server that will appear in theVMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Automation integration day2 chain.

VMware Aria Operations can manage workload placement and optimization for the custom data centers that reside in VMware Aria Automation-managed clusters.

However, VMware Aria Operations is not permitted to set tag policies for the custom data center. (At the Workload Optimization screen, the Business Intent window is not operational for VMware Aria Automation custom data centers.) When rebalancing a VMware Aria Automation custom data center, VMware Aria Operations uses all applicable policies and placement principles from both systems: VMware Aria Automation and VMware Aria Operations. For complete information on creating and managing VMware Aria Automation custom data centers that are managed by VMware Aria Operations, see the VMware Aria Automation documentation.