2.1 Provisioning a Virtual Machine

Provisioning is the first step in a VM’s life cycle. The Orchestration Server determines the best VM host machine for running the VM, unless you select a specific host server, datastore, or network to run the VM.

By default, you can run eight VMs at one time on a VM host. If you want to provision additional VMs, you must proportionately increase the vmhost.maxvmslots fact value for a particular VM host in the Orchestration Console.

Provisioning VMs that have only an NPIV disk is not supported. You can provision a VM that has a hard disk and an NPIV disk (that is, a SAN repository). The OS image of the VM is stored on the local hard disk and the data resides in the SAN repository.

The Orchestration Server uses provisioning adapters to perform life cycle functions. Provisioning adapters are programs that control (start, stop, snapshot, migrate, or pause) a VM. They run as regular jobs on the Orchestration Server.

The system can discover SAN repositories for Xen and vSphere hosts.

The constraints used to determine a suitable VM host evaluate the following criteria to provide heterogeneous VM management:

For procedures and more information on provisioning VMs, see Section 2.3, Managing a Running Virtual Machine.