What's important to keep track of with a vBlock?

Question

What are the most vital aspects to keep track of in a vblock? Cpu allocation, memory, storage allocation?

It's a pre-setup environment that allows for infrastructure virtualization at scale with parts from VMware, Cisco, and EMC

http://www.vce.com/products/vblock/overview

My case is more specific to the system metrics rather than performance. Maybe, allocating some of the pool's cpu to another vm or understanding how much free memory there is at a given point.

can you define what YOU consider a 'vblock' to be please, it doesn't really mean anything to most you see — Chopper3, Jul 01 '14 at 17:15
It's a pre-setup environment that allows for infrastructure virtualization at scale with parts from VMware, Cisco, and EMC. @Chopper3 — anm, Jul 01 '14 at 17:20
@Chopper3 - Cisco, EMC, and VMware : http://www.vce.com/products/vblock/overview — mfinni, Jul 01 '14 at 17:21
My case is more specific to the system metrics rather than performance. Maybe, allocating some of the pool's cpu to another vm or understanding how much free memory there is at a given point. @NathanC — anm, Jul 01 '14 at 17:24
You guys can delete your comments at this point, I edited the question for the OP. — TheCleaner, Jul 01 '14 at 17:26
Andi - if your question is "how does resource management work in an ESXi cluster", then that's a different question. One, I'll add, that is answered in the documentation, in which case you should go read that, and then come back and ask a more specific question. — mfinni, Jul 01 '14 at 17:48
@mfinni - well yeah, but that's quite a specific meaning of that word - I wanted the OP to clarify if they meant that or something else — Chopper3, Jul 01 '14 at 17:49
Chopper - it's a trademarked product, I don't think there are other meanings for the word. — mfinni, Jul 01 '14 at 17:50
Actually found a long explanation of what I was looking for here [youtube video from vmworld](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08S0X43jCQ) thank you all — anm, Jul 10 '14 at 16:25

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 01 '14 at 17:19

All of those, and probably more. You don't mention storage IO performance, for example, and that's usually important.

You need to measure performance of your workload(s) if you can, and you absolutely need to be measuring system performance metrics, so that when the former takes a hit, you can figure out the cause, which might be a bottleneck, which you will then need to fix or workaround.

So it's entirely dependent on your workload(s). If you know their performance limiters on this architecture very well, then maybe you can get away with only measuring a few performance metrics. But I'd advise against that, and measuring/instrumenting as much as you can.

Again: that's both the system metrics, and some objective external performance indicator of your apps! (and internal performance, if you can instrument that.) And this is in no way specific to VCE vBlock, or even virtualization in general. This really applies to any systems.

What's important to keep track of with a vBlock?

1 Answers1