I haven’t tried this yet but turns out disabling DRS literally destroys all resource pools and leaves vCloud Director inoperable. Sounds nasty but thats what VMware is telling us.
Well so is there a fix? Well seems like there isn’t! You have to recreate the entire environment in vCloud Director which, can be, a lot of work. Not just you have to clone the vm’s in vCloud director as existing vms will all be deleted with the work around suggested by VMware.
Disabling DRS in vCenter Server destroys all resource pools and renders vCloud Director inoperable. It is recommended that you contact VMware technical support for assistance with recovering from this issue.
Here is the full KB article that also has the work around to the issue.
Bottom lab, do not disable DRS in vCenter. You will need it to allow vms to move around to satisfy their resource requirement. If you do not want a vm to move around, I recommend using the DRS rules to pin a virtual machine to a specific hypervisor.
You can alternatively deploy that virtual machine on a local disk for a hypervisor that will prevent it from moving around.
That is partially correct. Disabling DRS breaks vCloud Director. None of your VMs should actually be deleted, but vCloud Director won’t be able to find any of them. It keeps track of them in its own database instead of just relying on vCenter to provide the location of a VM.
If you need to prevent VMs from moving in a cluster you can set DRS to “Manual” to achieve the same effect without losing all of the resource pools or having to manually bind each VM (or deploy on local storage).
Thanks for the input Ian. Good catch!