Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS), which has been introduced in vSphere 5, is one of the most exciting features available in vSphere.

Storage performance has always been one of the pain points for virtual environment administrators. While datastore space utilization is easier to monitor and manage, storage I/O load has always been difficult to keep track of and even more difficult to manage properly. At the same time, I/O congestion can lead to dramatic performance degradation. Furthermore, I/O usage usually changes throughout the day and week, which makes it difficult to fairly balance the I/O load for a long period of time.

SDRS analyses storage space utilization and I/O load over a period of time, and makes recommendations for VM placement to ensure proper load and to prevent future imbalance of I/O usage and latency. If configured, it can also apply recommendations automatically.

SDRS is a solution for storage resource utilization similar to...