If you’re suffering from the pain of an under-resourced IT environment – in staff, in budget, or in tooling – then you can be sure that you’re not alone. This is one of the top business challenges that our customer face. And the challenge presents the proverbial question – how to do more, with less? To get more staff, you can go lobby your manager, but chances are that pushing on this ‘lever’ will take some time. Lobby for more budget? Maybe, but you’ll invariably have to wait for the next budget cycle. If you want to see results quickly, one of the best ways to get more out of your IT infrastructure is to figure out where you may have over-allocated some resource – and in particular, vms.
What is right-sizing a Virtual Machine?
Whereas capacity planning is the process involved with planning the correct way to utilize resources for the future, “right-sizing” a VM is the process of reclaiming under-utilized resource components, such as compute and memory. This user in our community writes, “With regards to performance management, over-allocating VMs actually hurts their performance, their computing wait times.”
The advantages of right-sizing a VM – according to real users
Several vRealize Operations users have commented on how they have saved on storage through right-sizing. This vRealize Operations user writes, “We saved over 1000 virtual CPUs, a few terabytes of storage and memory. I can actually do the historics on any VM that’s being used so we can refuse architects that want to throw too much memory or CPU at something. We can do recommended sizing. For example, they put the SAP Hana environment in, and they sized it to the moon. They kept throwing more and more resources on it; ate up the majority of one of our FlexPods. We proved them wrong and dialed it down.”
This Systems Engineering Manager adds, “We’ve used it a lot of times to justify to other teams that own VMs whether or not their VMs are oversized or right-sized. We’ve been able to reclaim capacity by using data from vROps, so that’s been very helpful. Being able to reclaim capacity means you can run more efficiently.”
Users review vRealize Operations for right sizing VMs
This vRealize Operations user compares his current solution to his previous experience with Turbonomic, and writes, “I have used VMTurbo, but I like vROps much better. vROps has more in-depth analytics and things in it, and the capacity portion of it is much better. There’s only one or two things that VMTurbo might do just as well as vROps but, overall, I like to have all of my solutions in one single pane of glass, and that’s what vROps provides me.”
A consultant on our site reviews vRealize Operations and writes, “It’s huge in the performance management arena because it has the ability to really show us that we are over-provisioning a lot of the virtual machines to the point where they’re hurting themselves; too many virtual processors, too much memory. The virtual machines can actually be built smaller and perform better. vROps has the ability to provide insight, fully look at and monitor your environment, and give you recommendations on optimization, efficiency, and risk management.
‘For instance, let’s say that I have a virtual machine that appears to be starving for memory. vROps has the ability to monitor that virtual machine in real time, and give you a recommendation on how to make that virtual machine perform better. Possibly by, say, moving it to another host.”
You can read more real user reviews for vRealize Operations on IT Central Station.
