Initial Placement and Ongoing Balancing

Storage DRS provides initial placement and ongoing balancing recommendations to datastores in a Storage DRS-enabled datastore cluster.

Initial placement occurs when Storage DRS selects a datastore within a datastore cluster on which to place a virtual machine disk. This happens when the virtual machine is being created or cloned, when a virtual machine disk is being migrated to another datastore cluster, or when you add a disk to an existing virtual machine.

Initial placement recommendations are made in accordance with space constraints and with respect to the goals of space and I/O load balancing. These goals aim to minimize the risk of over-provisioning one datastore, storage I/O bottlenecks, and performance impact on virtual machines.

Storage DRS is invoked at the configured frequency (by default, every eight hours) or when one or more datastores in a datastore cluster exceeds the user-configurable space utilization thresholds. When Storage DRS is invoked, it checks each datastore's space utilization and I/O latency values against the threshold. For I/O latency, Storage DRS uses the 90th percentile I/O latency measured over the course of a day to compare against the threshold.