By Jason Gaudreau
Virtualizing helps data centers provide rapid deployment and increased business continuity, and provides a tremendous amount of capital savings with the reduction of hardware. However, with the substantial benefits and ease of deployment comes virtualization sprawl and resource proliferation. “Right-sizing” is the process of reclaiming underutilized resource components, such as compute and memory resources. In conjunction, there should be a process in place to validate that a guest virtual machine is still required by the business—this is typically considered a re-certification.
Virtual machine right-sizing helps you gain the most out of your technology investment in VMware vSphere, so it’s important to learn the fundamentals of optimizing infrastructure resources being utilized by guest virtual machines. Right-sizing
can increase or decrease guest resources to either increase performance of applications that are starving for memory and/or vCPU, or decreasing wasted resource capacity to increase host efficiency and density.
A regular right-sizing lifecycle on a quarterly or semi-annual basis can ensure maximum performance of your workloads and the efficient use of your underlying hardware. But, in order to make certain you don’t impact the business, you are going to want a structured process to understand the application workload. You can learn all the details and begin planning your right-sizing project by reading the VM Right-Sizing Best Practice Guide.
Jason Gaudreau is a Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware Professional Services. To read more from Jason, be sure to visit his blog here.
