SCVMM initiated VMotion ignores VMware Resource Pools
December 18th, 2008 | 
Author: It’s been well publicized that Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) can manage VMware Virtual Infrastructure. In fact, Microsoft has demonstrated that SCVMM can initiate virtual machine (VM) VMotions between VMware ESX hosts. However, Eric Gray points out on his VCritical blog that if you use SVCMM to VMotion VMs that are members of ESX Cluster Resource Pools the Resource Pool membership disappears afterwords.
The following was taken from Eric’s post Don’t know much about resource pools:
“Now, let’s say that one of your fellow administrators wants to use SCVMM to manage this VMware environment. He uses the SCVMM console to migrate a QA virtual machine from one ESX host to another in order to perform maintenance.
The VMotion completes without incident and everything seems OK…
Before too long, a QA engineer is on the phone asking what happened to his VM. From his perspective, the VM has disappeared.
It’s not really gone, it has just been moved out of the resource pool. Fortunately, you can log in with the VI Client and fix this problem by moving the VM back to the resource pool.”
I must first admit I have not done this personally, but I assume 2 things are happening here.
The first is that SCVMM does not present the option to select a Resource Pool while preparing for the migration (is there a gui based wizard to set it up?), and the second is that the QA engineer has permissions on the Resource Pool object only. I make these assumptions because VMware VirtualCenter (VC) does prompt you to select the Resource Pool membership of the VM (even if you do not want to change it) when migrating the guest, and the VM has only disappeared from the QA Engineers log in – I’m guessing when using the VI Client to connect to VC? So, the migrated VM ends up in the root Resource Pool and must be moved manually by a full administrator back to a Resource Pool where the QA Admin has permmissions.
In my opinion, Eric points out an inconvenience that needs to be understood for companies that are considering SCVMM as a “single pane of glass” tool to administrate a multi vendor virtual data center, but not a “show stopper”. Afterall, this is a scenario where a manual VMotion was used. I would prefer to have DRS manage migrations automatically for the majority of the time.
Don’t get me wrong, it needs to be fixed. I’ve listened to Microsoft claim that one of SCVMM’s aspirations is to have every feature available via VirtualCenter. Microsoft, hopefully you are now aware that SCVMM needs to be updated to include the Resource Pool membership attributes of VirtualCenter managed VMotions.
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