Compute and Storage Infrastructure Capacity Planning
Monitoring a virtual environment is vastly different from monitoring a physical infrastructure. There is no one-to-one correspondence between an operating system instance and a physical server. A typical virtualization host provides shared server, network, and storage resources for multiple operating system instances, each running their own OS and application workload.
As previously mentioned, the UC Sizing Tools are critical to assist with accurate solution sizing. These tools factor in data from performance testing, individual product limits and performance ratings, advanced and new features in product releases, design recommendations from this Cisco Collaboration Systems Release Solution Reference Network Designs (SRND), and other factors. Based on input provided by the system designer, the tools apply their sizing algorithms to the supplied data to recommend a set of hardware resources.
To optimize a virtualized environment, monitoring must encompass virtual resource utilization from the VM's perspective, application service levels, and physical resource utilization on the hosts.
Virtualization monitoring ensures that a virtualized infrastructure performs optimally and that virtual resources are properly allocated. Virtualized infrastructure monitoring requires collecting and evaluating key performance indicators (KPIs) for both physical and virtual components. For example, VMware KPIs include:
- Datacenters
- Clusters
- Datastores
- Hosts
- Resource pools
- Virtual Machines
Because physical resources are shared between VMs, problems that would be localized on a physical server can cascade through the virtualized infrastructure and compromise multiple applications. To cope with virtualization interdependencies, a monitoring strategy is required to optimize resource utilization by recognizing and reacting to performance and availability issues early in a problem cycle.
It is highly recommended that you follow VMware’s Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere for the specific release you are planning to deploy.
You can access the most current versions of the vSphere documentation by going to:
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs
You can access performance and other technical papers on the VMware Technical Papers page: