Capacity Summary Dashboard
The
Capacity Summary
dashboard is used by the Ops team to
explain capacity to IT Management. This dashboard works together with the
Inventory Summary
dashboard. The inventory provides details on
available resources and what is running on these resources. The capacity provides details on
the remaining capacity and time.Design Considerations
See Executive Summary Dashboards for
common design considerations among all the dashboards for the IT senior
management.
How to Use the Dashboard
The
Capacity Summary
dashboard has two sections:- The top section of the dashboard provides a summary at the vSphere World level.
- TheVM Growthwidget displays the weekly average of the VM growth and provides holistic visibility of overall growth across all data centers for both running and powered off workloads. If an increase in the VM count is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in utilization, these newly provisioned VMs are likely not yet used.
- TheOvercommit Ratiowidget highlights the efficiency gained by vSphere virtualization running multiple workloads on a shared infrastructure. Overcommitment has to be further reviewed along with elevated resource contention to understand the impact of performance on VMs competing for resources. In general, Overcommit is required to be financially more economical than the public cloud. As a reference, AWS typically overcommits CPU 2:1 by counting the hyper-threading and does not overcommit memory.VMware Aria Operationsuses physical CPU Cores not Logical Cores (Hyper-threading) for all CPU-based capacity calculations.
- The bottom section of the dashboard activates drill down into individual compute or storage capacity.
- Capacity is split into Compute (vSphere Clusters) and Storage (Datastores) views. The heat map displays capacity by size and color by time remaining. By selecting either Clusters or Datastores, you can further drill down understand the remaining capacity and time (in days).
Points to Note
- Capacity remaining is not displayed at the vSphere World level as it can be misleading, especially in a global, or large infrastructure. Clusters also tend to serve a different purpose and they are not interchangeable.
- If you are using both on-prem and external cloud, for example, VMware on AWS, consider splitting the dashboard into two columns.