You are correct again; that is additional information that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to add back into the original post. That question was also answered for me during the Q&A portion of the session.

I hope to have the post updated with information from the Q&A session later this evening.

Thanks for your clarification and information!

Thanks for commenting and adding that information; I appreciate it. I actually meant to go back and edit this post with information gathered from the Q&A section, where I asked about the interaction between PRO and DRS. Your comment reminded me to go back and fix that.

The information I received in the Q&A portion of the sesion was that DRS and PRO may conflict with each other, so Microsoft is recommending VMware customers disable DRS when PRO is involved. Is that accurate from your understanding?

Thank you for also clarifying, even though I stated above, that SCVMM will drive live migration (VMotion) when used to manage VMware hosts.

If there is any other information that readers should also have, feel free to post additional comments. Thanks!

VMM communicates directly with VMware VirtualCenter for most management operations, however, moving files onto an ESX host requires a direct connection with the host. A customer can configure the VM Delegate Account in VirtualCenter to allow non-root user to perform these file operations.

“All this talk about intelligent placement makes me wonder what Microsoft’s recommendation or requirement is regarding DRS on managed VMware clusters? Is there a recommendation to disable DRS? Would VC’s intelligent placement functionality conflict with the SCVMM intelligent placement capability?”
VMM’s intelligent placement ensures the best host is chosen at the time you are moving a virtual machine. PRO is the VMM feature that watches the app/vm/host performance over time and will rebalance your resources. A lot of customers have said they will disable DRS in favor of PRO so they can have one set of policies driving the balancing of resources across all their virtual machine hosts.

“PRO is kind of like VMware DRS, but since Hyper-V doesn’t provide any live migration functionality. In that regard, it falls far short of matching the DRS functionality.”

PRO works against Hyper-V and VMware and will drive the live migration of VMware vms based on app/vm/host performance monitoring. Plus, PRO includes application knowledge and PRO spans Hyper-V and VMware environments. PRO is also extensible by customers and partners.