we are looking for a way to allow Private Cloud (VRA) requestors to specify an individual ESX host to which a VM should be provisioned. To accomplish this, we need a better understanding of how the vRA placement logic works with vSphere so that we can manipulate it to select a specific host within a cluster when choosing where the VM should land.
Are you aware of any documentation that goes in detail regarding the algorithm(s) used during vRA VM placement to a vSphere cluster? Or are there any engineering/product team contacts within VMware that would be able to provide that information?
We *think* that we may be able to accomplish this using the method described in the following article, but even the author seems to make some assumptions when it comes to how the placement works out-of-the-box: https://vmguru.com/2017/07/how-to-specify-a-deployment-target-when-using-vrealize-automation/
Also, DRS is set to “Manual” for the ESX clusters where we would want to provision the VMs, so that should be taken into account as well for any VMware resources that may be answering these questions.
