In your private datacenter, right sizing your workloads and reclaiming capacity ensures you have enough capacity to accommodate everything you need to run. After all, there is never an unlimited amount of funds available for hardware so you need to run your VMs and applications as efficiently as possible. The ability to quickly find and report on waste is paramount to running a cost-effective environment.
This same diligence towards efficiency needs to be undertaken in your VMware Cloud on AWS. The cloud offers new flexibility and agility; even though you can add a new host in about 10 minutes, you still have limits to how many hosts you can afford. This quick ability to expand your number of hosts and overall resource footprint means you will be able to run things “hotter” in the cloud. You should think about increasing your consolidation ratios and how much you over-allocate CPU and memory to get the most out of your new SDDC. This does not mean you should ignore your overall demand footprint or abandon your allocation/over-allocation strategy all together. Nevertheless, in the cloud, increasing the numbers compared to your private datacenter just makes sense.
Bottom line, you still want to have visibility and control over any waste in the cloud environment in order to meet these allocation targets. However, controlling that waste does not have to wait until you have migrated your workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS. In fact, it should start now. Once you have chosen your applications and know which workloads are associated with them you should look at trimming them down before migrating them to the cloud.
A solution like vRealize Operations can help you accomplish this task via its Capacity Reclaimable dashboard. This view helps you quickly find and automatically reclaim unused disk, CPU and memory from your virtual environment and right-size your workloads for the cloud.
Out-of-the-box vR Ops does this by datacenter or cluster which is perfect if you are migrating to the cloud due to retiring old hardware. By clicking the datacenter or cluster object you provided an overview of the reclaimable capacity therein.
The rest of the dashboard is also updated to highlight any VMs that have reclaimable disk, CPU or memory. Simply select the VM you want to right-size and use the action button to execute it. You can choose the recommended sizing or select your own.
The Reclaim Disk Space widget shows you VMs with large/old snapshot that you would not want to migrate to the cloud or filesystems that are over-provisioned and might need to be trimmed.
The Reclaim Memory widget shows VMs with large memory allocation but with small actual memory utilization footprints. This is another area where you should look at right sizing before migration.
The Reclaiming Capacity with vRealize Operations video will walk you through the dashboard so you can better acquaint yourself with its usage.
While the out-of-the-box dashboard works great for the hardware retirement use case it may be a bit clunky if you are looking to move specific VMs and applications from across your entire datacenter. To assist you with this use case, VMware has provided a simple PowerShell script and a new vRealize Operation dashboard to meet this need.
The script takes the output from the VMware Cloud on AWS Assessment and loads the VMs into a custom group inside of vRealize Operations. The custom dashboard then provides you the ability to view only the VMs in this group and perform capacity reclamation tasks on them to right-size them and prepare them for migration to the cloud.
The Creating a Migration Dashboard for vRealize Operations video will walk you through the script and the steps needed to set all of this up. Its very simple and should only take a few minutes to do so. You can find the script and the dashboard here.
Right-sizing your workloads prior to moving them to the cloud will save you time and money and will allow you to have a cost-efficient cloud environment starting on day 1.
