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