VM Utilization Dashboard

The VMware administrator uses the VM Utilization dashboard with the VM Contention dashboard for managing performance.

Design Considerations

Use the VM Utilization dashboard to identify virtual machines with a high utilization in a selected data center. When utilization exceeds 100%, performance can be negatively impacted especially when a queue develops inside the Windows or Linux operating systems. By default, VMware Aria Operations has a 5-minute collection interval. For 5 minutes, there might be 300 seconds worth of data points. If a spike is experienced for a few seconds, it might not be visible if the remaining 300 seconds is low utilization.

To view the common design considerations among all performance management dashboards, see the Performance Dashboards.

How to Use the Dashboard

• Select a data center from the data center table.
  • For a smaller environment, select vSphere World to see all the VMs from all the data centers.
    Note: The count of VMs includes the powered off VMs too. To exclude powered off VMs, modify the widget and select the running VM metric.
• VM Peak CPU Usage (%).
  • There is no peak memory use as it is not applicable. Memory is a form of storage, for example consider a hard disk occupied space. A 90% utilization of the total space is not slower than 10%. This means that the issue is related to capacity issue and not performance.
  • The bar chart is color coded using five colors instead of four. The color gray is introduced to convey any wastage. Resources that are hardly utilized do not signify that the performance is at its peak. It can also mean the opposite. For example, if a VM needs 1+ vCPU, configuring it with 2 CPUs results in better performance instead of configuring it with 128 CPUs.
• VM Peak Utilization.
  • Analyze by data center as performance problems tend to be isolated in a single physical environment. For example, a performance problem in country A typically does not cause a performance problem in country B.
  • The table focuses on peak utilization, because the context is performance and not capacity.
• Select a VM from the table.
  • All the health charts show the KPI of that VM.
  • Compliment the free memory with the memory IOPS or the memory throughput metric. The metrics in a gigabyte measure the space, and not the speed. Memory is a form of storage, so what you must measure is the rate, for example, read-write per second.

Points to Note

• The VM Utilization dashboard complements the VM Contention dashboard. For more information, see the points to note in the VM Contention Dashboard.