Idle VM's - Why should we care? (1 of 3)

The re-emergence of Virtualization technologies, such as VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V, Xen and Linux KVM has provided organizations with the tools to create new operating system platforms ready to support the services required by the business, in minutes rather than days. 

Indeed IT itself is a service to the business.

In more recent times, Cloud computing which in itself is underpinned by Virtualization, makes use of the functionality provided to satisfy :

• on-demand resources
•           the ability to provision faster
•           rapid elasticity (refer to NIST 's description of Cloud Computing)

     Cloud computing makes full use of the underlying clustered hardware. Constant strides are being made by Virtualization vendors to improve the Virtual Machine (VM) to Host ratio, without affecting the underlying performance. 

But, you may ask "What's this got to do with Idle VMs?"

Well, as I described earlier Virtualization provides the means to easily and quickly provision virtual systems. Your CTO/CIO is going to demand a significant ROI once  an investment in both the hardware and virtualization software has been made, possibly switching the focus to an increase in the VM to Host ratio. 

“What's wrong with that?” I hear you say.  Nothing at all, as long as you keep track of what VMs you are provisioning and :

•          what resources you have granted
•          what they are for

Failure to do so will mean that your quest for a good ROI and a satisfied Chief will be in jeopardy, as you’ll encounter a term most commonly known as VM Sprawl.

More about this on Friday.

In the meantime why not register for our webinar VMware Cluster Planning'

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Idle VMs - Why should we care? (2 of 3)

In my previous blog I mentioned the term VM Sprawl and this is where Idle VMs are likely to factor. 

Often VMs are provisioned to support short term projects,  for development/test processes or for applications which have now been decommissioned.  Now idle, they’re left alone, not bothering anyone and therefore not on the Capacity and Performance teams radar.

Which brings us back to the question.  Idle VMs - Why should we care? 

We should care, for a number of reasons but let's start with the impact on CPU utilization.

When VMs are powered on and running, timer interrupts have to be delivered from the host CPU to the VM.  The total number of timer interrupts being delivered depends on the following factors:

·       VMs running symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), hardware abstraction layers (HALs)/kernels require more timer interrupts than those running Uniprocessor HALs/Kernels.

·       How many virtual CPUs (vCPUs) the VM has.

Delivering many virtual timer interrupts can negatively impact on the performance of the VM and can also increase host CPU consumption.  This can be mitigated however, by reducing the number of vCPUs which reduces the timer interrupts and also the amount of co-scheduling overhead (check CPU Ready Time). 

Then there's the Memory management of Idle VMs.  Each powered on VM incurs Memory Overhead.   The Memory Overhead includes space reserved for the VM frame buffer and various virtualization data structures, such as Shadow Page Tables (using Software Virtualization) or Nested Page Tables (using Hardware Virtualization).  This also depends on the number of vCPUs and the configured memory granted to the VM.

We’ll have a look at a few more reasons to care on Monday, in the meantime why not complete our Capacity Management Maturity Survey and find out where you fall on the maturity scale. http://www.metron-athene.com/_capacity-management-maturity-survey/survey.asp

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant