As a virtual infrastructure administrator or other IT professional, you determine that compute and storage resources in a given data center are volatile and a regularly scheduled optimization action can address the problem.

vRealize Operations monitors virtual objects and collects and analyzes related data that is presented to you in graphical form at the Workload Optimization page. Depending on what appears, you may determine that you must schedule optimization functions to distribute a workload more evenly in a data center or custom data center.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have all required permissions to access the Workload Optimization UI and manage vCenter Server objects.

Procedure

  1. Select Workload Placement under Optimize in the left menu
  2. From the carousel of data centers across the top of the page, select a data center for which you want to schedule repeated optimization actions.
  3. In the Workload Optimization pane, click SCHEDULE.
  4. Give the schedule a name and choose a time zone.
  5. Determine how often you want to repeat the optimization action and click the relevant radio button under Recurrence.
    Depending on your selection under Recurrence, additional options appear to the right. In this instance, you choose to repeat the optimization daily.
  6. Leave the current date and time.
  7. Select the Repeat every day radio button.
  8. Select the Expire after radio button and tick the counter up to 6.
  9. Click Save.

Results

The optimization action repeats for six days, then stops.

At the Workload Optimization page, the Scheduled button appears in the upper right of the Workload Optimization pane if optimization actions are scheduled for the selected data center. If you want to edit or delete a schedule, click the Scheduled button. The Optimization Schedules page appears, where you can perform those actions.

Note: If you schedule a number of optimization actions close together, and the optimization plans of two or more actions include overlapping functions, that is, they impact the same set of resources, the system shifts the actions into a queue. As a result, some actions may complete later than expected, with longer running actions and other potential system constraints extending the lag time. Optimization actions that do not overlap can run concurrently.

What to do next

To confirm that your optimization action was finished, go to the Recent Tasks screen by selecting Administration on the top menu, and clicking History > Recent Task in the left pane. In the Recent Tasks screen, use the Status function on the menu bar to locate your action by its status. You can also search using a range of filters. For example, filter on Event Source and enter the name of the scheduled optimization plan.

Note: Because real-time data center resource contention is dynamic, the system calculates a new optimization plan each time the scheduled optimization action starts, but before it runs. The system does not run the action if the system determines that the data center container is balanced at this moment. On the Recent Tasks page, the name of the affected data center appears in the Object Name column, and the Message “The optimization of the selected container cannot be improved” appears under Details. Another possibility is that a scheduled optimization plan is attempted, but does not go forward. In this event - which is not the same as a "failed" action - the name of the affected data center also appears in the Object Name column.