The VM Capacity dashboard helps you analyze the capacity of all the VMs with the ability to analyze each VM.

Design Considerations

See Capacity Dashboards for common design considerations among all the dashboards for capacity management.

How to Use the Dashboard

  • Overall Analysis

    The Datacenters table lists all your data centers. vSphere World is included so you can see all the VMs from all the data centers. Unlike infrastructure objects, there are potentially tens of thousands of VMs. The charts will take longer to refresh if you select vSphere World.

    The VMs by Capacity widget, groups the VMs by capacity remaining, while the VMs by Time Remaining widget groups the VMs by time remaining. Ideally, you want all of them to be low on capacity remaining, but high on time remaining.

    The heat map provides an additional view by grouping them by cluster. The heat map helps you identify which cluster is at risk (where most of the VMs need more capacity) and which cluster provides extra resources (where most of the VMs are not using their capacity).

    Review the VMs by Capacity Remaining heat map. The heat map provides the next level of detail by grouping the VMs by clusters, so you can see which clusters need attention. The VM size is standardized for better visualization.

  • VM Analysis

    Review the VMs Capacity in the Selected Datacenter table that lists all the VMs in the selected data center. The list is sorted by the VM with the least capacity remaining. You can also sort by Time Remaining.

    Select a VM from the table. The capacity details are displayed. You can view both the CPU and memory trend over time. Three months data is displayed and is averaged to hourly so you can see the overall trend.

    Disk details are displayed using the Guest OS partition. Avoid using VM virtual disk as there may not be a direct mapping to the actual partition.

    The recommendation for right-sizing is displayed for both CPU and memory. Unlike a physical server, it is important to right-size a VM. For CPU, the CPU Usage counter is used instead of Demand. For disk, Guest OS partition level is displayed. There is no overall capacity at the VM level because different partitions have different capacity.

  • Relevant Configuration

    Relevant configuration is automatically displayed to provide context to the VM. Information such as VM owner and business units can be useful in the analysis.