A customer has some CPU intensive applications running that will be deployed in the virtual...

According to the HPE SimpliVity Administration Guide1, one of the possible solutions to avoid the potential problem of CPU intensive applications impacting the performance of other virtual machines is to deploy the CPU intensive virtual machines on HPE SimpliVity, and configure for them CPU affinity parameter. This parameter allows you to specify which physical CPU cores are used by a virtual machine, and thus isolate the CPU intensive workloads from the rest of the virtual machines. This way, you can still leverage the HPE SimpliVity features, such as data efficiency, backup and restore, and federation management, for these virtual machines. The other options are not correct because:

Presenting HPE SimpliVity datastores to external ESXi system that will house the CPU intensive virtual machines is not a recommended solution, as it will reduce the data efficiency and availability benefits of HPE SimpliVity, and introduce additional complexity and overhead in managing the external ESXi system1.

Adding an external ESXi cluster to HPE SimpliVity Federation, and enabling Intelligent Workload Optimizer is not a recommended solution, as it will require additional hardware and software costs, and may not guarantee the optimal performance of the CPU intensive virtual machines, as the Intelligent Workload Optimizer is based on heuristics and not on strict rules2.

Adding an external ESXi system to HPE SimpliVity cluster, and enabling DRS functionality for CPU intensive virtual machines is not a recommended solution, as it will violate the HPE SimpliVity cluster requirements, and may cause issues with the HPE SimpliVity federation and data protection features1. References: 1: HPE SimpliVity Administration Guide (A00019350ENW), pages 23, 25, 28, 32, 342: HPE SimpliVity Intelligent Workload Optimizer User Guide (A00019354ENW), pages 5, 7, 9.