Resource Consumption within VMware

I've just hosted an Athene Training and User Forum for our clients, which looks in detail at resource consumption within VMware and thought I would share some of my thoughts with a wider audience.

With its rapid deployment in most large organizations, the tracking of resource consumption within a VMware environment is one of the major activities performed for Capacity Management within an Enterprise.

One of the strengths of Athene, our Capacity Management software, is its ability to report on the various resource metrics that will be critical to your VMware environment.

The key to making virtualization a success is to ensure you have sufficient resources at any time to satisfy demand. In order to ensure you have sufficient resources, you need to have a consistent reporting process.  This process can consist of a Web Portal / Dashboard for daily reports and ad-hoc reports for troubleshooting.

Trend reports are a critical item in your reporting process, as these will allow you to forecast the future and keep you abreast of potential areas for review based upon both increased demand and current consumption rates. 

The traditional areas Performance Analysts focus on are CPU, memory and IO. However, with virtualization you need to make sure that these components are looked at from the top down and then in reverse. This means starting by reviewing your resource pool allocations, moving on to the clusters, hosts and finally the virtual machines, and then reversing the process.

One item you have to make note of is the headroom for the various performance metrics, as this is going to affect the high availability and dynamic resource procedures that have been put into place within an organization. 

In future blogs, we‘ll discuss how to track those resource wasters along with how modeling factors into your traction of resources. 

http://www.metron-athene.com/athene/environments/virtualized/virtualized_platforms.html

Charles Johnson
Consultant