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

When is a peak not a true peak?


One common requirement I get from customers is the need to size for peaks. I've seen many mistakes in defining what a peak actually is.

So, let's elaborate on peaks.

How do you define peak utilization or contention without being overly conservative or aggressive?

There are two dimensions of peaks: you can measure them across time or across members of the group.

Let's take a cluster with eight ESXi hosts as an example. The following chart shows the ESXi Hosts Utilization for the eight hosts.

What's the cluster peak utilization on that day?

The two dimensions of peaks

As you can see from the graphs, it is not so simple. Let's elaborate:

  • Approach 1: You measure across time. You take the average utilization of the cluster, roll up the time period to a longer time period, and calculate the peak of that longer time period. For example, the average cluster utilization peaks at 65 percent at 9:05 am. You roll up the data for one day. This means the peak utilization for that...