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AlexBakman
Contributor
Contributor

Capacity Planning

All

Post P2V conversion, how are you monitoring and planning your capacity usage (cpu,memory, storage, network) in Hosts, clusters, resource pools?

How do you proactively detect capacity bottlenecks?

Can somebody point me to a "best practices" documents?

thanks everybody

Alex

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azn2kew
Champion
Champion

You can start reading about VI3 Performance and Tuning guide here.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!! Regards, Stefan Nguyen VMware vExpert 2009 iGeek Systems Inc. VMware vExpert, VCP 3 & 4, VSP, VTSP, CCA, CCEA, CCNA, MCSA, EMCSE, EMCISA
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dmorgan
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Have you run the capacity planner in the VI client? You may try adding machines to the capacity planner, and letting that run for a period of time. See what the CPU and memory usage is over time. This doesn't address other extraneous factors such as network, storage, or disk I/O, but should give you a good idea of where to start.

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AlexBakman
Contributor
Contributor

Is Capacity Planner available as a product I can download and install

I thought was more from helping P2V, but once you are virtualized it is not much use in managing on ongoing basis. Is that correct?

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Patrick_Miller
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Capacity Planner is only available as part of the Virtual Center server.

For capacity planning, we have a base configuration for all servers(modified for certain circumstances). We deploy the VM using this, and monitor the machine for a two week period. For the first few days, I'll keep a close on just to make sure it isn't experiencing any problems, then I'll then make adjustments if needed after the two weeks.

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Rodos
Expert
Expert

Have you looked at vCharter from Vizioncore?

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AlexBakman
Contributor
Contributor

Patrick

If we bought VC, your are saying we have Capacity Planner in the package?

Alex

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AlexBakman
Contributor
Contributor

I did, but to find capacity bottlenecks I have to look at gazillion charts.

30 hosts * 15 * clusters * 10 resource pools * 4( cpu, memory, storage, network) = 18,000 charts that I have to look at!

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Rodos
Expert
Expert

If thats the case then I doubt the new Capacity Estimator in VC is going to give you anything at all. Its really just for looking at a few metrics of existing physical hosts and giving a recommendation on candidate for virtualisation.

So are you trying to look at things from a host and storage level or go down to the VM level? Do you have any monitoring tools for the rest of your environment, maybe you could leverage those along with SNMP on the hosts and SAN fabric?

P.S. Do you really have 15 separate clusters of only 2 hosts each?

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Patrick_Miller
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ok...hold on....I think some lines of communication were crossed along the way (Including mine! Smiley Happy ).

Capacity Planner is a stand alone "product", only available during a professional VMware consultation of your site. This is not something customers can purchase, it's more of a service.

The Consolidation analyzer is what is included in VC Server. This will recommend a specific ESX host based on the physical machines cpu and memory usage, and perform a bare bones P2V conversion.

It sounds like you will need to start looking at 3rd party utilities to accomplish your monitoring and sizing goals. Someone mentioned vCharter from Vizioncore, I would start there.

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AlexBakman
Contributor
Contributor

I know it is a lot of clusters...it is a dev/qa environmrnt and is artifically high in clusters.

What is your ratio of hosts to clusters? What's more typical out there?

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Hermanbw
Contributor
Contributor

You should also take a look at OmniVision from Systar. It is a cross-platform capacity management solution

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aleph0
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

hi,

vizioncore vFoglight do all that ou want: future behaviour of the virtual env too

hth

\aleph0

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