Going back to the early days of virtualization, capacity planning always was a process needed to be done at some point. If you have embraced virtualization, you know what the benefits are and why it’s important to go through a thorough capacity planning process. However, sometimes it is hard to know what for or where to look and where to begin.
During my day-to-day work I talk to a lot of customers who wish for this to be a much easier process, for me to tell them what to look for, and if they aren’t already using vCenter Operations they want one single pane of glass dashboard with all the data they need.
In this multi-part blog post series, I will show you how to pull out capacity planning data for ESXi hosts Cluster CPU, memory, storage, density ratios and VM deployments (just to make things shorter I decided to ignore networking for now) in one vCenter Operations custom dashboard with a single click on a cluster resource kind.
The first step in laying down the dashboard infrastructure is to create all the Super Metrics and dynamic groups. For this to work, we will use some OOTB (out of the box) metrics and create a Super Metric package which will include some Super Metrics of our own.
Before you continue reading this post and in order for you to get more knowledge on Super Metrics, please read the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Administration Guide Custom User Interface (pg. 39).
In the first part for this blog post series we will create the CPU and Memory related Super Metrics.
In the metrics table, which we will use to guide us throughout this series, gray color represents OOTB metrics and orange color represents Super Metrics which we will create.
| CPU | Memory | Storage | Density and VM Deployment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cluster Total CPU Capacity (GHz) | Cluster Physical Memory Capacity (GB) | Cluster Shared Storage Total Capacity (GB) | Cluster VM to Host Ratio |
| Cluster Total CPU Demand (GHz) | Cluster Total Memory Usage (GB) | Cluster Shared Storage Used Space (GB) | Cluster vCPU to pCPU Ratio |
| Cluster Total CPU Demand (%) | Cluster Memory Usage (%) | Cluster Shared Storage Used Space (%) | Cluster vMem to pMem CPU Ratio |
| Cluster Shared Storage Throughput (KBps) | Cluster Deployed VMs | ||
| Cluster Total IOPS |
Table 1 – Capacity Planning OOTB Metrics and Super Metrics
So, now that you know how you actually need to create it using the following formulas, do not try to copy the formulas in the screenshots, as each Resource or Resource Kind ID are unique in each environment. Like I said, you need to create it by yourself.
Cluster Total CPU Capacity (GHz)
| sum($This Resource:CPU Usage|Total Capacity (MHz))/1000 |
| CPU Usage|Total Capacity (MHz) = Resources > Cluster Compute Resource > Attribute Kinds: CPU Usage > Total Capacity (MHz) |
Cluster Total CPU Demand (GHz)
| sum($This Resource:CPU Usage|Demand (MHz))/1000 |
| CPU Usage|Demand(MHz) = Resources > Cluster Compute Resource > Attribute Kinds: CPU Usage > Demand (MHz) |
Cluster Physical Memory Capacity (GB)
| sum($This Resource:Memory|Provisioned Memory (KB))/1048576 |
| Memory|Provisioned Memory (KB) = Resources > Cluster Compute Resource > Attribute Kinds: Memory > Provisioned Memory (KB) |
Cluster Total Memory Usage (GB)
| sum($This Resource:Memory|Usage (KB))/1048576 |
| Memory|Usage (KB) = Resources > Cluster Compute Resource > Attribute Kinds: Memory > Usage (KB) |
Don’t forget to stay tuned for the next part in this series as I will show you how to create shared storage vC Ops dynamic groups and its related Super Metrics and perform manipulations on vC Ops interaction XML files in our journey to create an awesome 1-click interactive capacity planning custom dashboard.
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