Tuesday, 20 December 2016

Virtualization Oversubscription - What’s so scary? Reservations (16 of 20)

As promised on Monday here’s a quick demonstration of what a reservation does.


When both VMs want the same amount of resource (and have the same shares) they will get an even share of the CPU.  Assuming they both want all of the 4000MHz available they will each get 50% of what they want.
As the Production workload reduces Test will take more and more of the CPU, however Production will always have the rights to use 250MHz CPU.
At the point where Production is using 250MHz CPU Production is in effect getting 100% of the CPU it wants while Test is getting 93.75% of the CPU it wants.  Despite having the same shares values.
Reservations and Shares
If we run the scenario again but this time include the Shares values for the VMs the situation is different.

When they are both trying to use all of the CPU the effect of the shares will come into play and with only 1000 shares Test will get 1333MHz of the 4000MHz available while Production will get 2666MHz or Test gets 33% of what it wants to use and Production gets 66% of what it wants to use. 
As the Production workload decreases this ratio should be maintained until Production gets to its reservation.  At which point Production is in effect getting 100% of the CPU it wants while Test is getting 93.75%. I'll talk more about Reservations on Friday when we take a look at an Expandable Reservation.
In the meantime do sign up to some of our webinars, we're covering some great topics in 2017.

Phil Bell




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