Wednesday 23 November 2016

Virtualization Oversubscription (What’s so scary?) - What can be oversubscribed? (4 of 20)


Today I'll deal with what can be oversubscribed.
What can be oversubscribed?

        CPUs

        Memory

        Disk

        NICs

In our virtual world, now that we have broken the link between the OS and the hardware, we can over provision all sorts of things.

CPU, Memory, Disk (as we mentioned) and NICs are all “Oversubscribed”.

Disk we have already looked at, Memory and CPU I’ll go into in more detail on later but I thought it was worth mentioning NICs here. 

Typically people seem to be running with 10 - 15 VMs on a single host which will have significantly fewer NICs installed. A Server typically wouldn’t use all the bandwidth of its NIC so that unused bandwidth is like the unused space on disk.

When the VMs talk to other VMs on the same Host that’s not generating traffic though the physical NICs, so we might consider that as the equivalent of de-duplication.
In the next few blogs I'll be looking at CPU and Memory.
Phil Bell
Consultant

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