Today
we’ll take a look at some of the implications around sizing our cloud
resources, more specifically systems being Undersized and Oversized and what we
should be doing to get it right.
As mentioned in the Cloud Computing introduction, in a cloud computing environment you should be able to self provision computing capabilities. One of the primary steps taken before deployment, would be to perform Application Sizing. This process enables you to accurately provision the correct amount of resource required to support the application(s) avoiding any potential performance issues and any unnecessary costs. Without this you could run the risk of being undersized which can lead to poor performance and Service Level Agreements (SLA) being affected.
Cloud providers will implement limits to restrict usage. This of course can be increased for a cost. Even if the initial resource usage costs are low, there could be higher costs down to the financial impact of possible SLA penalties and / or loss of business or productivity due to poor application performance and this in turn can damage the reputation of the business. Cloud bursting may be required if you are undersized and need some additional capacity very rapidly and this approach can incur higher usage premiums.
Over sizing or overprovisioning. The key here is whether you have provisioned too much capacity? You may have over provisioned to wholly satisfy an SLA due to strict penalties, but it could be costing you far more than is actually required.
Gartner state "that most organizations overprovision the resources in their IT environment by more than 100% with an average utilization of physical environments of only 10% and virtual environments of 35%". (extracted from “Does Cloud Computing Have a ‘Green’ Lining? – Gartner Research 2010)
This is primarily to cope with peak workload demands, which typically do not occur very frequently. Save costs on resource usage by provisioning the optimum level to satisfy all criteria, i.e. SLA’s. Costs such as Software Licensing where you are licensed per CPU would incur more costs because you have provisioned more CPU’s than necessary.
How does over capacity affect other services in the cloud? Are other services restricted because capacity has been over provisioned? Could this lead to poor performance?
Single-threaded applications on a vSMP VM do not gain any performance benefit, moreover resources are not only wasted, they affect the performance of the underlying ESX host because they have to manage and provide resources to the associated worlds (processes).
A virtual machine is a group of worlds and each vCPU assigned has a world plus one for the Mouse, Keyboard and Screen (MKS) and one for the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM)
Over provisioning leads to VM Sprawl.
Memory resources can be shared across virtual machines, however over provisioning puts further pressure on ESX to manage allocation of resources to virtual machines.
Our objective therefore, is to get our On Demand Sizing just right and I’ll be looking at how this can be achieved on Wednesday. Sign up for our Community where you can download free white papers and webinars on-demand
Jamie Baker
Principal Consultant
As mentioned in the Cloud Computing introduction, in a cloud computing environment you should be able to self provision computing capabilities. One of the primary steps taken before deployment, would be to perform Application Sizing. This process enables you to accurately provision the correct amount of resource required to support the application(s) avoiding any potential performance issues and any unnecessary costs. Without this you could run the risk of being undersized which can lead to poor performance and Service Level Agreements (SLA) being affected.
Cloud providers will implement limits to restrict usage. This of course can be increased for a cost. Even if the initial resource usage costs are low, there could be higher costs down to the financial impact of possible SLA penalties and / or loss of business or productivity due to poor application performance and this in turn can damage the reputation of the business. Cloud bursting may be required if you are undersized and need some additional capacity very rapidly and this approach can incur higher usage premiums.
Over sizing or overprovisioning. The key here is whether you have provisioned too much capacity? You may have over provisioned to wholly satisfy an SLA due to strict penalties, but it could be costing you far more than is actually required.
Gartner state "that most organizations overprovision the resources in their IT environment by more than 100% with an average utilization of physical environments of only 10% and virtual environments of 35%". (extracted from “Does Cloud Computing Have a ‘Green’ Lining? – Gartner Research 2010)
This is primarily to cope with peak workload demands, which typically do not occur very frequently. Save costs on resource usage by provisioning the optimum level to satisfy all criteria, i.e. SLA’s. Costs such as Software Licensing where you are licensed per CPU would incur more costs because you have provisioned more CPU’s than necessary.
How does over capacity affect other services in the cloud? Are other services restricted because capacity has been over provisioned? Could this lead to poor performance?
Single-threaded applications on a vSMP VM do not gain any performance benefit, moreover resources are not only wasted, they affect the performance of the underlying ESX host because they have to manage and provide resources to the associated worlds (processes).
A virtual machine is a group of worlds and each vCPU assigned has a world plus one for the Mouse, Keyboard and Screen (MKS) and one for the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM)
Over provisioning leads to VM Sprawl.
Memory resources can be shared across virtual machines, however over provisioning puts further pressure on ESX to manage allocation of resources to virtual machines.
Our objective therefore, is to get our On Demand Sizing just right and I’ll be looking at how this can be achieved on Wednesday. Sign up for our Community where you can download free white papers and webinars on-demand
Jamie Baker
Principal Consultant
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