Using DRS Affinity Rules

You can control the placement of virtual machines on hosts within a cluster by using affinity rules.

You can create two types of rules.

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Used to specify affinity or anti-affinity between a group of virtual machines and a group of hosts. An affinity rule specifies that the members of a selected virtual machine DRS group can or must run on the members of a specific host DRS group. An anti-affinity rule specifies that the members of a selected virtual machine DRS group cannot run on the members of a specific host DRS group. See VM-Host Affinity Rules for information about creating and using this type of rule.

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Used to specify affinity or anti-affinity between individual virtual machines. A rule specifying affinity causes DRS to try to keep the specified virtual machines together on the same host, for example, for performance reasons. With an anti-affinity rule, DRS tries to keep the specified virtual machines apart, for example, so that when a problem occurs with one host, you do not lose both virtual machines. See VM-VM Affinity Rules for information about creating and using this type of rule.

When you add or edit an affinity rule, and the cluster's current state is in violation of the rule, the system continues to operate and tries to correct the violation. For manual and partially automated DRS clusters, migration recommendations based on rule fulfillment and load balancing are presented for approval. You are not required to fulfill the rules, but the corresponding recommendations remain until the rules are fulfilled.

To check whether any enabled affinity rules are being violated and cannot be corrected by DRS, select the cluster's DRS tab and click Faults. Any rule currently being violated has a corresponding fault on this page. Read the fault to determine why DRS is not able to satisfy the particular rule. Rules violations also produce a log event.