The Heavy Hitter VMs dashboard helps you identify virtual machines which are consistently consuming a large amount of resources from your virtual infrastructure. In heavily over-provisioned environments, this might create resource bottlenecks resulting in potential performance issues.

You can use this dashboard to identify the resource utilization trends of each of your vSphere clusters. With the utilization trends, you can also view a list of VMs within those clusters based on their resource demands from the CPU, memory, disk, and network within your environment. You can also analyze the workload pattern of these VMs over the past week to identify heavy hitter VMs which might be running a sustained, heavy workload that is measured over a day, or bursty workloads that is measured using peak demand.

You can export a list of offenders and take appropriate action to distribute this demand and reduce potential bottlenecks.

You can use the dashboard widgets in several ways.

  • Select a Cluster: Use this widget to select a cluster. You can use the filter to narrow your list based on several parameters. After you identify the cluster you want to view, select it. The dashboard is automatically populated with the relevant data.
  • Cluster CPU and Cluster Memory: Use these widgets to view the CPU and memory for the cluster.
  • Cluster IOPS and Cluster Network Throughput: Use these widgets to view the IOPS and network throughput for the cluster.
  • Use the other widgets in the dashboard to view which VMs in the cluster generated the highest network throughput and IOPS. You can also view which VMs in the cluster generated the highest CPU demand and the highest memory demand. You can compare the information for the VM with the results for the cluster and correlate the trends. You can manually set the time to the time period for which you want to view data.