Continuing along in our series around the four pillars of vRealize Operations, this blog will focus on the second one, Optimize Capacity.
You'll notice right at the top, there is a dollar figure, in this case $4339. This represents the potential monthly cost savings if I were to reclaim unused resources. Below that, you'll find four options:
Access Capacity - determine if there is a sufficient capacity in your environment.
Reclaim - reduce waste by reclaiming unused resources.
Plan - run scenarios to plan for future projects and changes.
Assess Cost - analyze the costs of running your environment.
Accessing capacity is always one of the highest priority items for administrators, datacenter managers, procurement teams, and executives. They can all use the Access Capacity dashboard to dig deeper, let's explore:
Once in, you'll see a tile for each Datacenter at the top, it'll include several items:
- Datacenter name
- Time remaining (based on it's most constrained resoure: CPU, RAM, Disk)
- Potential cost saving if unused resources are reclaimed
- Optimization Status: Optimized, Not Optimized, Unknown.
Below that is the Time Remaining widget showing all Clusters in the selected Datacenter and their time remaining status, ie do they have enough capacity. In the example below, all three Clusters in the selected Datacenter have enough capacity (according to their assigned Policies).
To the right of that is the Optimization Recommendations widget.
It tells us how much we can save (monthly cost) if we were to reclaim unused resources: powered off VMs, idle VMs, orphaned VMDKs, etc. It lists the number of VMs and Orphaned Disks (VMDKs not attached to VMs) available for reclamation. There is a VIEW RECLAIMABLE VMs box at the bottom which jumps the user to the Optimize Capacity - Reclaim dashboard, which we'll explore in the next blog post.
Finally, the bottom widget shows Cluster Utilization, with the ability to sort by the most constrained resource: CPU, Memory, or Disk. The user also has the ability to select any Cluster in the chose Datacenter.
How is Cluster Utilization being calculated? Great question, there is an Information bubble describing it.
Another important piece of this conversation is how vROps is calculating the actual time remaining. Click on the pencil box to the right of the time remaining metric to explore the policy that determines time remaining:
We're using the vSphere Default Policy here, but if you'd like to adjust Cluster Time Remaining settings, simply create a new policy (a child policy to the Default policy) then adjust settings you want and apply it to the Clusters or Custom Group of Clusters you'd like. There are three sections here:
Criticality Threshold - number of days remaining thresholds
Risk Level - how conservative or aggressive vROps will calculate time remaining. Descriptions are included.
Allocation Model - this is where the user would set overcommit ratios if they wanted to use them. They are off by default.
At last, we have the Cluster Utilization chart itself. It will show the Cluster/metric combination that you've chosen, over the selected time frame, with a projection. We're looking at Cluster USS Cluster and CPU Demand over the last month with a one month projection below.
On the left hand side of the dotted line you'll see history, in this case CPU Demand and Capacity. On the right hand side of the dotted line you'll see a projected range of consumption and capacity. This provides the user with a projection based on historic consumption, a very powerful tool!