Cloud zone spread placement policy not behaving as expected

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Spread placement policy is set on the cloud zone however its not respected.
• If datastores/clusters are shared between hosts then the spread policy will work as expected, however when datastores are not shared only one host is selected in random and hence spread is not applied.

Environment

VMware vRealize Automation 8.x

Cause

This is a known limitation and vRA is not directly supporting this multiple host selection via storage profiles,  This is something in the pipeline for a future release but we do not have a timeline at present.

Resolution

The issue is a known limitation.

Workaround:

There is a workaround available if you wish to leverage spread placement policy when datastores are not shared between hosts.

1. Create and use tags directly in vCenter in all the datastores that you need to be selected for provisioning. For example a tag 'vraProvisioning' . Use same tag for the datastores belonging to both clusters for example SiteA-Cluster-A and SiteA-Cluster-B.

2. Create a storage Policy from vCenter using Enable tag based placement rules, and select 'vraProvisioning' it will select all the datastores tagged as 'vraProvisioning' in vCenter,

3. Now allow one cycle of datacollection to happen.

4. Create a Storage profile for this region keeping Datastore/Cluster as blank, select storage policy created in step2, add 'vraProvisioning' as capability tag.

5. Add the tags to the Blueprint YAML

with

storage:

constraints:

tag : vraProvisioning

and machine level tag as env:cluster

 

This should enable vRealize Automation to select both the hosts SiteA-Cluster-A and SiteA-Cluster-B. and then proceed with Spread placement Policy,

 

 

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:

Spread placement policy is not respected when datastores & datastore clusters are not shared between hosts.