Now that you have a good understanding of how vRealize Operations Intelligent Workload Placement, vSphere DRS, and vSphere Storage DRS work together, let's see how we can leverage this in vRealize Automation.

Beginning with vRealize Automation 7.3 and vRealize Operations 6.6, you can leverage the capabilities of both products to optimize your workload placement.

vRealize Automation is playing the role of a governance engine. When a blueprint request for a new virtual machine comes to vRealize Automation, it determines which business group the requestor is a member of and the eligible reservations the business group has access to. A reservation policy is configured with a vSphere cluster and one or more Datastores or datastore clusters. A business group may be assigned multiple reservations, some or all of which may reside on different vSphere clusters.

So, how does vRealize Automation determine the best placement option?

The following is the process used by vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations to determine the best (most optimized) reservation upon request for a blueprint from the catalog:

1. A request for a VM comes to vRealize Automation.
2. vRealize Automation determines the eligible reservations, following the process mentioned above. In this example, there are only two eligible reservations for the request. vRealize Automation has no insight into the utilization of different clusters, or hosts within a cluster. It cannot determine, from a utilization point of view, which is the best reservation to be used.
3. vRealize Automation passes all eligible reservations, or the clusters those reservations are configured for, to vRealize Operations for optimization recommendation.
4. vRealize Operations uses a combination of Intelligent Workload Placement and vSphere DRS to determine the most optimized workload placement.
5. vRealize Operations returns a recommendation from the options presented by vRealize Automation.