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

CPU counters at the ESXi level


The counters at the ESXi level are naturally similar to the ones at the VM level, as the hypervisor is also an OS. The key difference is that there are counters that are not applicable to ESXi hosts, such as Entitlement, Max Limited, and System.

The values at the hypervisor level reflect the aggregate value of all VMs in the host plus the hypervisor's own workload. The hypervisor generates its own workload, for example, vMotion, cloning, and other tasks. Kernel modules such as Virtual SAN and NSX also take up CPU resources.

Unlike VMs, which have 17 counters for CPU, ESXi comes with 15 counters for CPU. Also, unlike VMs, which provide 11 counters at the CPU core level, ESXi only provides five counters at the CPU core level. The remaining nine counters that are not available at the core level are as follows:

  • Usage in MHz

  • Total capacity

  • Wait

  • Demand

  • Ready

  • Readiness

  • Reserved capacity

  • Latency

  • Swap Wait

  • Co-stop

This means you will not be able to track contention at the physical...