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 VM level


vCenter 6.0 Update 1 provides 28 counters for RAM in order to track the various features of VM memory management. Compared to physical servers, where you normally just monitor the memory utilization and swapping, these are a lot counters. All the counters are shown in the next screenshot. With 28 counters per VM, a vSphere environment with 1,000 VMs will have 28,000 counters just for VM RAM!

It is certainly too many to be monitored as part of overall management. The latter part of this chapter will share the three key counters you need to track to manage performance and capacity.

VM – RAM counters

At the ESXi level, vCenter provides 33 counters. As you can expect, some of the counters at the ESXi level are essentially the sum of associated counters of all VMs running in the host, plus vmkernel's own memory counters (since it also consumes memory). This aggregation is useful as VMs do move around within the cluster. Since there are a lot of counters, let's compare...