I was in a meeting last week with Engineering and a question had come up on whether customers were actively using the Anti-Affinity (AA) VM-Host Rules capability and if so, what are some of the use cases? We know that Anti-Affinity VM-VM Rules are used quite regularly by customers and the use cases are pretty well understood, but what is not clear was the usage and frequency of AA VM-Host rules. I figured I could help Engineering by asking some of my Twitter folllowers, the following question:
Anyone using Anti-Affiity VM-Host Rules today (e.g. VMs should/must not run on specific ESXi hosts)? Had a chat w/Engr the other day, they were curious if customers used this at all compared to Affinity VM-Host Rules & what the use case might be? pic.twitter.com/7EASBAvvt5
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) June 21, 2018
In an attempt to avoid any confusion, I also included a screenshot of the AA VM-Host Rules in the vSphere UI which you can see above. However, it looks like my attempt had failed and I actually received a number of replies that described AA VM-VM Host Rules (separate certain groups of VMs from each other, regardless of host groups), rather than AA VM-Host Rules (do not run certain groups of VMs on specific host groups). Perhaps the question could have been better phrased or it was just a simple misinterpretation, but overall it was a very useful exercise and it was great learn about all the different use cases for BOTH AA VM-VM and AA VM-Host Rules, so thank you to everyone who shared their feedback.