vCloud Director 10 has introduced a new concept called VM placement policies which helps Cloud Provider to control the virtual machine (VM) placement on a specific cluster or host.VM placement policies give cloud providers various options to allocate resources to various use cases like:

1. Deploy VM’s to specific cluster based on performance requirement
2. Deploy VM’s to Specific cluster based on resource requirements
3. Deploy VM’s based on Licensing requirement as a part of Oracle/SQL licenses optimisation
4. Allocate specific hosts to specific Tenants
5. Deploy container/special use case specific VMs to a specific host/cluster
6. Restrict elastic VDC pools to deploy VMs to a specific cluster

vCD Provider administrator create and manage VM placement policies and placement policies are created and managed for each provider VDC, because a VM placement policy is scoped at the provider VDC level.

Create a VM Placement Policy

Before we create VM Placement policies, provider need to perform few steps on vCenter , so lets go and login to vCenter which is providing resource to vCloud Director and go to Cluster -> Configure -> VM/Host Groups

In this case i want to limit deployment of Oracle and MS SQL VM’s to specific hosts due to licensing, so let’s create Hosts groups and VM Groups:

Host Groups: 

To create Host Groups , Click on Add inside VM/Host Groups:

1. Enter  Host Group Name
2. Select Type as “Host Group”
3. Click on Add to add Host/Hosts of the cluster.

VM Groups

To create VM Groups , Click on Add inside VM/Host Groups

1. Enter  VM Group Name
2. Select Type as “VM Group”
3. Click on Add to add VM/VMs of the cluster. (select any dummy VM as of now)

once both the groups has been created go to VM/Host rules in the cluster and create a rule.

VM/Host Rules

To create VM/Host Rules, Click on Add inside VM/Host Rules

1. Enter  Rule Name
2. Ensure “Enable rule”
3. Select rule type as “Virtual Machine to Hosts”
4. VM Group: Select VM Group that we have created above
5. Here you have four choices: (In my case i have choose Must rule)
   • Must run on host in group
   • Should run on host in group
   • Must not run on host in group
   • Should not run on host in group
6. Host Group: Select Host Group that we have created above

From vCenter prospective we are done, we have multiple choice to create VM to Hosts affinity/anti-affinity rules , once we have created rules , vCloud director picks up only “VM Groups” which provider will expose to tenants.

Create VM Placement Policies in vCloud Director

1. Go to Provider VDCs.
2. Click on a provider VDC from the list , in my case it was “nsxtpvdc”
3. Click on “VM Placement Policies”
4. Click the VM Placement Policies tab and click New.

New Policy Creation Wizard

1. First Page , click on Next
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2. Enter a name for the VM placement policy and description and click Next
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3. Select the VM groups or logical VM groups to which you want the VM to be linked and click Next.

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4. Review the VM placement policy settings and click Finish.
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Publish VM Placement Policies to Org VDC

When provider creates a VM placement policy, it is not visible to tenants. Provider need to publish a VM placement policy to an org VDC to make it available to tenants and publishing a VM placement policy to an org VDC makes the policy visible to tenants. The tenant can select the policy when they:

• Create a new standalone VM
• Create a VM from a template,
• edit a VM
• add a VM to a vApp
• Create a vApp from a vApp template. 

To publish this newly created policy to tenants , go to:

1. Organization VDCs and Select an organization VDC
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2. Click the VM Placement Policies tab and Click Add.
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3. Select the VM placement policies that you want to add to the organization VDC and click OK.
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4. Provider can make certain policies as “Default” when customer does not choose any policy , system will automatically use “Default”.
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Policy Usage by Tenant

Once policies has been created and exposed to tenant organisation, tenant can use those policies while provisioning VMs. like here i have created two policies “Oracle” and “SQL” and tenant can choose based on workload requirement.

NOTE –  Placement Policies are optional and a provider can continue to use the default policy that is created during installation and only one policy can be assigned to a VM.

This completes the creation of placement policies and their exposure to tenants. please feel free to share/comment.