Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

VMware DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) is a load balancing utility that assigns and moves computing workloads to available hardware resources in a virtualized environment.

DRS can be configured to recommend workload balancing or to automatically move workloads. VMware DRS users can refine resource allocation with affinity rules and anti-affinity rules. The utility allows VMware administrators to prioritize resources according to application importance.

The Distributed Power Management (DPM) feature of DRS can consolidate workloads in off-peak hours to minimize energy consumption in the data center. VMware DRS also aids in scheduled server maintenance by balancing VMs’ workloads across other hosts.

VMware DRS is part of VMware Inc’s vSphere virtualization suite, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions. With vSphere 5.0 and newer releases, VMware introduced Storage DRS, which balances VM storage consumption with data store clusters, based on the same principles as VMware DRS.