VMware, Virtual Center Headroom (17 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Today I’ll show you one final report on VMware, which looks at headroom available in the Virtual Center.

In the example below we’re showing CPU usage. The average CPU usage is illustrated by the green bars, the light blue represents the amount of CPU available across this particular host and the dark blue line is the total CPU power available.

 

VMware – Virtual Center Headroom

 

 

 

We have aggregated all the hosts up within the cluster to see this information.

We can see from the green area at the bottom how much headroom we have to the blue line at the top, although actually in this case we will be comparing it to the turquoise area as this is the amount of CPU available for the VM’s.

This is due to the headroom taken by VMkernel which has to be taken in to consideration and explains the difference between the dark blue line and the turquoise area.

 

Summary

To summarize my blog series, when reporting:

•        Stick to the facts

•        Elevator talk

•        Show as much information as needs to be shown

•        Display the information appropriate for the audience

•        Talk the language for the audience

….Tell the Story

Hope you've enjoyed the series, if you have any questions feel free to ask. If you're interested in VMware Capacity Management don't forget to book on to our workshop http://www.metron-athene.com/services/online-workshops/index.html#vmwarevsphere

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

VMware Reports (16 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Let’s take a look at some examples of VMware reports.

The first report below looks at the CPU usage of clusters in MHz. It is a simple chart and this makes it very easy to understand.

 

VMware – CPU Usage all Clusters

You can immediately see who the biggest user of the CPU is, Core site 01.

 

The next example is a trend report on VMware resource pool memory usage.

The light blue indicates the amount of memory reserved and the dark blue line indicates the amount of memory used within that reservation. This information is then trended going forward, allowing you to see at which point in time the required memory is going to exceed the memory reservation.

 

VMware – Resource Pool Memory Usage Trend

 

A trend report like this is useful as an early warning system, you know when problems are likely to ensue and can do something to resolve this before it becomes an issue.

We need to keep ahead of the game and setting up simple but effective reports, provided automatically, will help you to do this and to report back to the business regarding requirements well in advance.

On Thursday I’ll show you one final report on VMware, which looks at headroom available in the Virtual Center, in the meantime take a look at out VMware vSphere Capacity and Performance Essentials workshop.
http://www.metron-athene.com/services/online-workshops/index.html#vmwarevsphere

Charles Johnson
Principal Consultant

Model – Linux server change & disk change (15 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Following on from Wednesday's blog today I'll show the model for change in our hardware.

In the top left hand corner we are showing that once we reach the ‘pain’ point and then make a hardware upgrade the CPU utilization drops back to within acceptable boundaries for the period going forward.

In the bottom left hand corner you can see from the primary results analysis that the upgrade would mean that the distribution of work is more evenly spread now.

The model in the top right hand corner has bought up an issue on device utilization with another disk so we would have to factor in an I/O change and see what the results of that would be and so on.

In the bottom right hand corner we can see that the service level has been fine for a couple of periods and then it is in trouble again, caused by the I/O issue.

Whilst this hardware upgrade would satisfy our CPU bottleneck it would not rectify the issue with I/O, so we would also need to upgrade our disks.

When forecasting modeling helps you to make recommendations on changes that will be required and when they will need to be implemented.

On Monday I'll take a look at some examples of VMware reports.
In the meantime why not register for our next webinar Capacity Planning and Forecasting using Analytic Modeling http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Charles Johnson
Principal Consultant

Modeling Scenario (14 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

I have talked about bringing your KPI’s, resource and business data in to a CMIS and about using that data to produce reports in a clear, concise and understandable way.

Let’s now take a look at some analytical modeling examples, based on forecasts which were given to us by the business.

Below is an example of an Oracle box, we have been told by the business that we are going to grow at a steady rate of 10% per month for the next 12 months. We can model to see what the impact of that business growth will be on our Oracle system.

In the top left hand corner is our projected CPU utilization and on the far left of that graph is our baseline. You can see that over a few months we begin to go through our alarms and our thresholds pretty quickly.

Model – oracleq000 10% growth – server change

In the bottom left hand corner we can see where bottlenecks will be reached indicated by the large red bars which indicate CPU queuing.

On the top right graph we can see our projected device utilization for our busiest disk and we can see that within 4 to 5 months it is also breaching our alarms and thresholds.

Collectively these models are telling us that we are going to run in to problem with CPU and I/O.

In the bottom right hand graph is our projected relative service level for this application. In this example we started the baseline off at 1 second, this is key.

By normalizing the baseline at 1 second it is very easy for your audience to see the effect that these changes are likely to have. In this case, once we’ve added the extra workload we can see that we go from 1 second to 1.5 seconds (a 50% increase) and then jumped from 1 second to almost 5 seconds. From 1 to 5 seconds is a huge increase and one that your audience can immediately grasp and understand the impact of.

We would next want to show the model for change in our hardware and I'll be looking at this on Friday.

In the meantime why not join our Community and get access to a wealth of Capacity Management Resources http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Business Metric Correlation (13 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

As mentioned previously it is important to get business information in to the CMIS to enable us to perform some correlations.

As in the example below we have taken business data and taken component data and we can now report on this together to see if there is some kind of correlation.

Business Transactions vs. CPU Utilization

In this example we can see that the number of customer transactions(shown in dark blue) reasonably correlates with the amount of CPU utilization.

Can we make some kind of judgment based on just what we see here? Do we need to perform some further statistical analysis on this data? What is the correlation co-efficiency for our application data against the CPU utilization?

Closer to the value of 1 indicates that there is a very close correlation between the application data and the underlying component data.

What can we do with this information back to the business? An example would be: This graph indicates that there is a very close correlation between the number of customer transactions and the CPU utilization. Therefore, if we plan on increasing the number of customer transactions in the future we are likely to need to do a CPU upgrade to cope with that demand.

On Wednesday I'll be looking at a Modeling scenario.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Linux Server – Disk Utilization (12 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

On Wednesday I said today I would share with you an example of a report on disk utilization of a Linux server. 

The report is illustrated below and the reason I chose to share this report is that it is an instance based report, displaying the top 5 disks and their utilization on this system.

You have the ability to pick out our top 5 or our bottom 5 to display to your audience because we don’t want too much ‘noise’ on our chart.

We want to keep things clear and concise, don’t flood reports with meaningless data and keep it relevant to our audience.

On Monday I'll be looking at how you can show correlation on reports, in the meantime don't forget to register for our next free webinar 'Capacity Planning & Forecasting using Analytic Modeling' 

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

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant