A data analytics engine, a notification mechanism, a costing platform, a performance analyzer, a capacity planner: vROps is all of those things and then some. This blog will focus on the capacity planning capabilities of vROps.
The ability to Optimize Capacity is a core capability of vROps and as such is offered as one of the four pillars from the Home Quick Start page.
We focus on the abilities to Assess Capacity, Reclaim Capacity, and Plan for future needs. Selecting Assess Capacity, you will be given a list of your Datacenter, the Clusters in that Datacenter, and Capacity Remaining, among others. Capacity Remaining at the Datacenter level is determined by the most constrained resource in that Datacenter: CPU, Memory, or Disk.
Selecting Plan, you are given a list of your Datacenters. Choosing one, you will be given Total Reclaimable Capacity within that Datacenter: things like Powered Off VMs, Idle VMs, Snapshot, and Orphaned Disks.
Selecting Plan gives you the ability to plan projects: add VMs, remove VMs, Add ESXi Hosts, Remove ESXi Hosts, migrate to Public Cloud Hyperscalers, and more. We discussed the What-If Analyses in detail in a previous blog.
What if I'm trying to determine how many VMs will fit into an existing Cluster? I can find this on the Cluster Summary page.
Clicking on the tile itself gives you more details.
The details include the Average Profile of VMs that can fit into the Cluster. Clicking it reveals that the Average Profile is determined by calculating the average utilization of consumers and the overcommit ratios (if enabled) against the usable capacity of the Cluster.
What if I run sized workloads (Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) and what to determine how many of each will fit? We can do this, but first we have to define our VM sizes. Go to Configure - Custom VM Profiles - ADD, then define your profiles.
I've defined five Custom VM Profiles.
Since I've defined Allocation based Custom VM Profiles, I need to make sure Cluster Capacity is using the Allocation Model.
Back at the Cluster Summary page, let's add these Custom VM Profiles to the Virtual Machine Remaining section.
Click the + button to add your Custom VM Profiles.
Check each box and click OK, this will add them to your Virtual Machine Remaining section.
They will be automatically enabled in your default Profile.
Give the vROps engine 10-15 minutes to make these calculations and check back.
You now have the ability to easily determine just how many of each size VM will fit into a Cluster. A dashboard using these new metrics might look something like this.
I've published this Dashboard (and Views) on VMware {code}, go get it here. Note that you will have to edit the top right widget to include the Profile metrics you've defined in your own environment. For more information on vROps and a trial go here!
Hi Brock. Thanks a lot for this blog. I have configured custom Profile in my environment as well as enable policies in capacity and in the dashboard output data i have configured the metrics based on my custom profile. But I am not getting output in how many more VM can fit. Can you help to find the solution
@ravinder - adjust your scoreboard widget top right to use the new metrics in your environment.
Hi Brock, thanks for this blog, i have one query, while configuring the same in my infra, I am not getting output in how many more vms can fit, where as in the object explorer I can the numbers as per size I defined. I followed all the steps given as per blog, anything else I need to configure.