Host Memory Utilization

[media_gen]

We are currently running 3 ESX Hosts that have about 45 VMs running, our memory utilization on each host is averaging around 8-10% at any given time. I think we're at a point now where we really do not need to add any more VMs until we either add another Host or up the memory in each of our existing Hosts, otherwise we'll be overutilized and not be able to take advantage of HA.

Can anyone else shed some light on where a good cutoff point is for memory utilization? It appears memory and disk is the current bottleneck in our setup as we still have plenty of CPU available.

Thanks!

[RParker]

Well it depends on your hardware. I have 4 Quad Core / 16G hosts we run 40 VM's EACH[/b]. So it depends on how much you want to push it.

If your utilization isn't over your limit, and you have enough room for expansion, you should be good. With HA you will lose a host. It's basically a standby unit that sits there until something happens, it may be good for very high, critical machines, but for us it's a waste of machine.

Clustering will do about the same thing (with VMotion) and you can share resource among the hosts.

Unless I missed something in your post (or maybe you could post the configuration of your machines) 8-10% utilization is very low... So I don't know where you stand on VM and host confiiguration.

[MR-T]

I'd be loooking to get 70% utilisation out of these servers before being concerned about resource.

If you're seeing 8-10% and still have plenty left for CPU then you shouldn't worry just yet.

You say the disks appear to be a bottleneck, what storage are you using?

[media_gen]

Each of our hosts has 16gb of memory, each average about 8-10gb used at any given time, not percent (I mis-typed in my first post).

We have a SAN for a our storage but the 3 LUNs we have allocated for ESX are at about 75-80% full. We're getting ready to free up another terabyte for ESX so this will alleviate our disk issue.