Compare Available Resources to Balance the Load Across the Infrastructure

A heat map can be used to compare the performance of selected metrics across the virtual infrastructure. You can use this information to balance the load across ESX hosts and virtual machines.

Prerequisites

If the combination of metrics to compare is not available in the list of defined heat maps, you must define a custom heat map first. See Create a Custom Heat Map.

Procedure

1. From the left menu, click Environment.
2. Select an object to inspect from an inventory tree.
3. Click the Heat Maps tab under the Details tab.
4. In the list of heat maps, click the one to view.
   The heat map of the selected metrics appears, sized and grouped according to your selection.
5. Use the heat map to compare objects and click resources and metric values for all objects in your virtual environment.
   The list of names and metric values for all objects shown on the heat map appear in the list below the heat map. You can click column headers to sort the list by column. If you sort the list by a metric column, you can see the highest or lowest values for that metric on top.
6. (Optional) To see more information about an object in the heat map, click the rectangle that represents this object or click the pop-up window for more details.

What to do next

Based on your findings, you can reorganize the objects in your virtual environment to balance the load between ESX hosts, clusters, or datastores.