A method receives physical location information for racks in which application running environments are located. Each rack includes multiple host computing devices in a cluster of host computing devices. Application running environment-rack associations are generated using the physical location information for the cluster where an application running environment-rack association maps an application running environment to a rack. The application running environment-rack associations are provided to the cluster. Then, the method provides a data set for storing in the cluster of hosts where the data set is associated with a placement strategy. The cluster uses the placement strategy to store a data block in the data set for a first application running environment and store a replica data block for a second application running environment at a location in the cluster based on the first application running environment being associated with a first rack from the application running environment-rack associations.