Capacity Summary Dashboard

The Capacity Summary dashboard is used by the Ops team to explain capacity to IT Management. This dashboard works together with the Inventory Summary dashboard. The inventory provides details on available resources and what is running on these resources. The capacity provides details on the remaining capacity and time.

Design Considerations

See Executive Summary Dashboards for common design considerations among all the dashboards for the IT senior management.

How to Use the Dashboard

The Capacity Summary dashboard has two sections:

• The top section of the dashboard provides a summary at the vSphere World level.
  • The VM Growth widget displays the weekly average of the VM growth and provides holistic visibility of overall growth across all data centers for both running and powered off workloads. If an increase in the VM count is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in utilization, these newly provisioned VMs are likely not yet used.
  • The Overcommit Ratio widget highlights the efficiency gained by vSphere virtualization running multiple workloads on a shared infrastructure. Overcommitment has to be further reviewed along with elevated resource contention to understand the impact of performance on VMs competing for resources. In general, Overcommit is required to be financially more economical than the public cloud. As a reference, AWS typically overcommits CPU 2:1 by counting the hyper-threading and does not overcommit memory.
    Note: VMware Aria Operations uses physical CPU Cores not Logical Cores (Hyper-threading) for all CPU-based capacity calculations.
• The bottom section of the dashboard activates drill down into individual compute or storage capacity.
  • Capacity is split into Compute (vSphere Clusters) and Storage (Datastores) views. The heat map displays capacity by size and color by time remaining. By selecting either Clusters or Datastores, you can further drill down understand the remaining capacity and time (in days).

Points to Note

• Capacity remaining is not displayed at the vSphere World level as it can be misleading, especially in a global, or large infrastructure. Clusters also tend to serve a different purpose and they are not interchangeable.
• If you are using both on-prem and external cloud, for example, VMware on AWS, consider splitting the dashboard into two columns.