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

Tier 1 compute


Let's recap from Chapter 5, Capacity Monitoring, what we need to produce to monitor capacity in tier 1 compute:

  • A line chart showing the total number of vCPUs left in the cluster

  • A line chart showing the total number of vRAM left in the cluster

  • A line chart showing the total number of VMs left in the cluster

Tier 1 compute – CPU

Let's look at the first line chart. The number of vCPUs left is essentially supply and demand. The supply and demand can be defined as the following:

  • Supply = (The total physical cores of all ESXi hosts) - (HA buffer)

  • Demand = The total vCPUs for all the VMs

On the supply side, we can choose physical cores or physical threads. One will be conservative while the other will be aggressive. The ideal number is 1.5 times the physical core, as that's the estimated performance improvement from Hyper-Threading.

My recommendation is to count the cores, not the threads. There are two reasons for this:

  • This is tier 1, your highest and best tier. If you are counting the...