Hi Leo,
I'm not entirely clear what you are trying to ask, allow me to ask some questions on bits of your question to get a better understanding. Anwers and questions are inline:
I have a VM that is running near CPU capacity all day long. I am looking at allocating more resources to alleviate the demand.
You can increase the resources for this virtual machine by adding more virtual CPUs to the virtual machine. If you have set a limit on the virtual machine I would suggest you remove this limit. Do you see that the virtual machine is getting the resources it demands? If it does not get the resources it wants a CPU reservation might be applicable to your situation. This article might help you better understand CPU reservations: http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/06/08/reservations-and-cpu-scheduling/
My question is; Will I be achieving the same thing if I create a Resource Pool as compared with using DRS?
A resource pool is a construct of a DRS cluster. It allows you to compartimentalize resources of the DRS cluster and have that consumed by resources.
Without DRS resource pool are not available. DRS allows to dynamically place the vm's to host to meet their demand.
My goal is to provide more CPU capacity for this specific host.
With host you mean the virtual machine? If so, a resource pool would not help if the ESX host is suppling all the resources a virtual machine demands.
The only way you can increase CPU capacity is to expand the VM configuration by adding more CPU resources.
I am not certain how creating a Resource Pool differs from using DRS? Other than DRS seem to manage resources dynamically.
Correct DRS attempts to provide the resources a virtual machine demands, by moving VMs to host to get an overal load balance. This way DRS attempts to match the dynamic demand of the virtual machines with the resource utilization of the hosts. A resource pool is a priority construct. It provides resources to its child objects (virtual machines or other resource pools) it comparimentalizes resources of a DRS cluster. By setting a reservation on a resource pool, the virtual machines inside the resource pool are always guaranteed to the availability of these resources.
ill I be achieving the same thing if I create a Resource Pool as compared with using DRS?
Like I mentioned before, resource pool are a construct of DRS, it cannot exist without DRS.
My goal is to provide more CPU capacity for this specific host. I am not certain how creating a Resource Pool differs from using DRS? Other than DRS seem to manage resources dynamically.
See above, resource pools provide resources to virtual machines, that are available in the cluster.
To ensure the availability of resoures, one can set reservation either on resource pool level or virtual machine level. Both guarantee the availability of resources but are different constructs for management purposes. Resource reservations in a resource pool are shared across the virtual machines inside the resource pool, where a reservation on a virtual machine is applicable only to that specific virtual machine