Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Sunny Dua
Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Sunny Dua

Overview of this book

Performance management and capacity management are the two top-most issues faced by enterprise IT when doing virtualization. Until the first edition of the book, there was no in-depth coverage on the topic to tackle the issues systematically. The second edition expands the first edition, with added information and reorganizing the book into three logical parts. The first part provides the technical foundation of SDDC Management. It explains the difference between a software-defined data center and a classic physical data center, and how it impacts both architecture and operations. From this strategic view, it zooms into the most common challenges—performance management and capacity management. It introduces a new concept called Performance SLA and also a new way of doing capacity management. The next part provides the actual solution that you can implement in your environment. It puts the theories together and provides real-life examples created together with customers. It provides the reasons behind each dashboard, so that you get the understanding on why it is required and what problem it solves. The last part acts as a reference section. It provides a complete reference to vSphere and vRealize Operations counters, explaining their dependencies and providing practical guidance on the values you should expect in a healthy environment.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
VMware Performance and Capacity Management Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Index

Performance versus capacity


Now that we know what IaaS performance is, what metric should we use to measure it?

A lot of customers mistake capacity with performance. They associate low utilization with high performance, for example:

  • Low ESXi CPU utilization means its performance is good (it is fast)

  • Low VM CPU utilization means its performance is good (it is fast)

If you ponder these points, you will see the failure in the logic. There are several reasons why your ESXi utilization is irrelevant:

  • Whether the ESXi has high or low utilization has nothing to do with its performance. An ESXi does not become slower as its utilization goes from 5 percent to 50 percent. It's still running at the same speed!

  • An ESXi with low utilization has a better chance of serving all its VM better than an ESXi with high utilization. There is certainly a correlation. The question is, how do you quantify that correlation? You cannot say that 25 percent ESXi CPU utilization means none of its VMs has CPU contention. Defending...