This modules allows you to make use of VMware’s DRS to sub-divide your vSphere clusters for consumption by defining DRS groups, affinity and anti-affinity rules. A good use case for this would the deployment of a VM that needs to be tied to specific host due to licensing or hardware constraints, or VMs behind load balancers that you want to make sure run on different ESXi hosts.

The module has many features which can viewed on the website here, but some of the highlights are:

• Create and manage vSphere DRS profile configurations directly in vRA and tie them to existing blueprints to enable affinity or anti-affinity relationships between VMs provisioned and existing DRS host groups.
• Automatic cleanup of appropriate linked VM rules and groups during VM de-provisioning lifecycles
• Allows for VM provisioning into specific pre-defined DRS host groups
• Dynamically creates VM group(s) and rule(s) during VM provisioning based on the corresponding SovLabs DRS profile configuration

Prerequisites:

• vCenter Server is properly configured
• vCenter cluster is properly configured and the host groups defined

Configuration:

1. Add vCenter Endpoint
   1. Login to vRA Tenant
   2. Select Catalog -> SovLabs vRA Extensibility
   3. 
   4. Click Request button for “Add SovLabs vCenter Endpoint”
   5. 
   6. Enter configuration label
      • Only AlphaNumeric characters, no spaces or special characters except: - and _
   7. Select vCenter version
   8. Enter PSC FQDN
   9. Embedded PSC = yes/no
   10. Enter vCenter Server FQDN
       • this should get populated
   11. Create credentials = yes
       1. This is not the vRA credentials so if you have not set this up through the catalog item request then you have to do so first.
   12. Enter username
   13. Enter password
   14. Click Submit
2. Add DRS Profile
   1. Login to vRA Tenant
   2. Select Catalog -> SovLabs vRA Extensibility
   3. 
   4. Click Request on “Add DRS Profile”
   5. 
   6. Enter configuration label
      • Only AlphaNumeric characters, no spaces or special characters except: - and _
   7. Select vCenter Endpoint
   8. Select Cluster
      • If the clusters do not show up, make sure you have Host groups defined in DRS or that the credentials are entered correctly.  Credentials can be updated through the SovLabs Catalog “Manage Credential Configuration”
   9. Select host group
      • I create 2 hosts groups within the cluster, with separate hosts in each, which will be assignment to each blueprint.
   10. Select Rule
       • I selected should run on hosts in group
   11. Click Submit

Enable the module:

Now we need to enable the custom properties module on our blueprint

1. Click on Design -> Blueprint
2. Edit Blueprint
3. Click on the blueprint vSphere machine on the Design Canvas.
4. Click on properties tab
5. In the properties group section click +Add
6. Check the box for:
   • Check the appropriate vSphere DRS property group (starts with SovLabs-DRS-)
   • Do not attach more than 1 vSphere DRS property group to a vSphere machine blueprint
7. Click OK
8. Repeat these steps for all blueprints that should use this custom naming.