With the release of the vRealize Operations Manager 7.0, VMware has changed the capacity planning behavior of the product. The vRealize Operations Manager 7.0 does not anymore make the Host vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio visible for the user. I know that Host vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio is with vSphere 6.5 and newer not anymore a valid capacity planning indicator but in my opinion, it`s still an interesting SLA.
To learn more about CPU Metrics and Performance SLAs, Iwan ‘e1’ Rahaboks Blog Posts are a good start:
If you want to deep dive into this Topic, the VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive from Duncan Epping and Niels Hagoort is a must read.
The vSphere Clusters (Cluster Compute Ressources) does have by default a metric called “vCPUs to Cores Allocation Ratio”. To use a similar Host-Level Metric in Dashboards and Alerts, I have created a new Super Metric:
As long as the Super Metric is enabled in your policies all hosts have the additional metric available:
And also an Alert Definition with different symptoms based on the consolidation ration can be created with the additional host metric:
Host vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio Dashboard
The dashboard I have created has three widgets: The list if vSphere Clusters as Object List, vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio as Top-N and the vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio / CPU Usage as a Heatmap.
The Object List is the provider for other widgets, but the Heatmap also works without a selected Object:
If a vSphere Cluster is selected from the Object list the whole Dashboard looks like that:
Download the dashboard
The Super Metric and the Dashboard are both available on the VMware {code} Example Exchange.
Super Metric
The Super Metric as JSON export:
{
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"resourceKinds": [
{
"resourceKindKey": "HostSystem",
"adapterKindKey": "VMWARE"
}
],
"modificationTime": 1541600267060,
"name": "vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio",
"formula": "${this, metric=summary|number_running_vcpus}/${this, metric=cpu|corecount_provisioned}",
"description": ""
}
}
Dashboard
The Dashboard as JSON export:
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** Update – 12.10.2018
The Link of this blog post had two great responses on Reddit and I want to add them to the original article.
Ghan_04 was wondering about this statement that vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio not anymore a valid capacity planning indicator.
Ghan_04 is right, without context the statement is wrong. I wanted to highlight that a high vCPU to Core ratio is not in all environments a problem in general and there is no formula to calculate when CPU contention occurs. An indicator for CPU contention is, for example, a high %READY counter.
bpitts2 mentioned that I have used SLA in the wrong context.
