I've been tasked with getting official recommendations for how to handle our specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anything. VMWare tech support has been near silent in the ticket I submitted, instead choosing to forward responsibility on to licensing support. Our reseller hasn't given me any decent response, or even a price quote relating to what we need. Google searches have brought up best practices guides, but they just seem to be more marketing materials than anything useful.
So, here's the situation:
We have a 2 machine cluster with vSphere Essentials Plus 5.5. Currently each host only has local storage, and yet my predecessor set them up in a cluster. Since it couldn't do any failover in case one host failed, we are (finally) getting some centralized storage soon. Even with this, we don't have enough memory on one host to keep all the VMs at maximum, and we have some VMs that are absolutely necessary to keep at 100%. Some will have memory swapped out. There is no way around that. So, my boss had me give some recommendations and asked for the official best practices for such things.
Here is what I have:
Option 1 (my main recommendation): Get more memory so we can get all the VMs up on one host. We would need 256GB of memory on each host.
Option 2 (my backup position): Set memory reservations on the most important VMs to make sure they get what they need. Also, set CPU shares to high on those same VMs.
Option 3 (my boss's suggestion): Use DRS and resource pools to automate the resource reservations for the high priority VMs. Of course, this requires upgrading to vCenter Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus, and that is expensive. I asked CDW for a quote, only to have the sales guy hook me up with their VMWare specialist to tell me it will be a big cost, and then not send me a quote. So, I can't give my boss any feedback on this one. (Really annoying in that it would cost us $3000 to get the memory, and about $17,000 for the E+ licenses, but he wouldn't listen to me.)
I can find no documentation to back up any of these positions, and my boss wants it. Advice?