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

Memory counters at the ESXi level


vCenter 6.0 Update 1 provides even more counters at the ESXi level: 38 counters for RAM plus 11 for vmkernel RAM. The vmkernel has around 50 processes that are tracked. As a result, a cluster of 8 ESXi can have over 800 counters just for ESXi RAM!

The counters are shown in the next screenshot. Most of them are not shown as a percentage, making it difficult to compare across ESXi hosts with different memory sizes.

ESXi – RAM counters

As for the vmkernel processes, they are not shown under the Memory group, but under the System group. In most cases, you do not need to track the CPU or RAM consumed by the kernel processes. We have covered them in Chapter 13, Memory Counters, so we will not repeat that here. From the following chart, you can see that the vmkernel takes up negligible memory:

ESXi kernel memory utilization

If you need to track the memory consumption of vmkernel, vRealize Operations provides two counters, as shown next:

VMkernel Usage and ESX System...