VKernel Capacity Analyzer a Strong Tool in VMware Environments

After installing the product and connecting to my VirtualCenter server to collect performance data, it was easy to navigate through my VMware clusters and hosts down to the individual virtual machines. Clicking on a VM revealed a host of data accompanied by sage advice. The “Current Capacity Bottlenecks” section highlighted the current problems affecting the performance in my environment.

Capacity Analyzer came configured with good baseline thresholds, but it was possible for me to adjust thresholds that were customized to my ESX Infrastructure environment. For example, I could view an ESX host and see that storage was highlighted as a constrained resource. Capacity Analyzer highlighted the resource in green to indicate that, at 8 percent utilization and trending flat, this wasn’t really much of a problem.

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Looking at the VMware cluster as a whole, Capacity Analyzer also made suggestions for the best place to deploy new VMs in my environment. The “Capacity Availability Map” listed the top five hosts or resource pools with the most available capacity, ordered by availability.

Capacity Analyzer tracks data store statistics and uses graphs to show total and free space. I was able to get a detailed look at LUNs (logical unit numbers) associated with the data store.

The product is loaded with reports that provide detailed information about resource usage and change in the ESX environment. Memory, storage, network usage, CPU and I/O Wait data are all collected and analyzed in easy-to-use graphs.

eWEEK Labs Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant can be reached at csturdevant@eweek.com.