6 Tasks You Cant Do With

Traditional IT Operations Tools

Why taking control of your
vSphere environment with
vCenter Operations Management
is the smart choice
Traditional monitoring tools designed for static
physical environments can overwhelm administrators
with low-level information, such as monitoring data
and alerts. Unfortunately, they often do not provide
visibility into the factors that are causing poor
performance. Without this insight in a dynamic
virtualized environment, virtual machines are often
over-provisioned as a safeguard, which leads to
inefficient use of resources and lower server
consolidation ratios. In addition, with no clear view of
the health, performance and efficiency of the virtual
environment, ensuring high-availability and meeting
SLAs can be challenging.
VMware vSphere with Operations Management
meets these operational insight challenges and more.
It simplifies and automates operations management
by offering intuitive dashboards and leveraging
patented analytics, to help you optimize the
performance, health and availability of your virtual
environment.
The result is a more resilient and efficient virtual
infrastructure that maximizes ROI, uptime and
performance.

vCenter Operations
Management Badges:
At-a-glance health indicators
A simple badge system illustrates the state of a
virtual environment or individual object. These are
color-coded and range from a healthy green to
yellow, orange or red, reflecting increasingly serious
issues. Badges are arranged in a hierarchy, where the
scores of minor badges contribute to that of the
major badge.

Health

Indicates immediate problems that

require attention. Overall health is
based on the minor badges of
workload, anomalies and faults.

Risk

Indicates performance issues based

on time remaining, capacity remaining
and stress factors.

Efficiency

Highlights areas with the potential to

improve performance or reduce cost
based on waste and infrastructure
density. For example, a large amount
of wasted resources combined with a
low density ratio gives a poor
efficiency rating.

Take a look at what vCenter

Operations Management can
do to optimize your vSphere
environment with these 6 tasks:

vCenter Operations Manager dashboard

1. Optimize performance

2. E
 liminate memory bottlenecks

Accurately identify a problem caused

by change events

Reduce over-consolidation

VMware vSphere with Operations Management

helps you correlate change events with health and
workload scores to proactively identify performance
issues in your environment.
By looking at the workload score for individual
resources, such as CPU, memory, storage and the
network, you can see where performance is
constrained in your environment.
In addition, Demand Metrics take into account how
many virtual machines (VMs) are running on the host
and shows ways of alleviating any pressure through
shares, limits etc.

By looking at your environment with the vCenter

Operations Management dashboard, you get at-aglance views into the health, risk, and efficiency of
the workloads in your virtualized infrastructure.
With this information, you will be able to identify and
address potentially damaging memory bottlenecks.
Through the dashboard, these measures can be
tracked over the long-term, to highlight a persistent
stress point in your environment that should be fixed.
With vCenter Operations Management, memory
allocation can be viewed in multiple contexts, so it is
possible to distinguish between a workload problem
with physical memory or a configuration problem at
the virtual layer.
In addition to showing overall demand for memory
at the host level, you can break down the memory
metrics to show what is used by each event and
identify problem areas.

3. Clear away storage bottlenecks

Debug performance issues due to disk I/O
Comprehensive visibility of your hosts, VMs and
your storage system on one screen with vCenter
Operations Manager provides a holistic view of I/O
commands to spot and correct performance issues.
Task 1: Optimize performance by proactively
identifying performance issues

Once you have identified that storage is the

bottleneck, you can then drill down to identify the
specific line or datastore where the problem is
occurring.
The result is that, in addition to complete visibility
across the IT stack, you have the capability to look
at the actual storage objects that are backing up the
VMs and address the performance issue.

5. Better manage future risk

Utilize capacity analysis and what-if modeling
Look for longer term or future upcoming risks in
your environment by tracking key metrics and
also defining and monitoring average VM profiles.
There are already millions of vSphere deployments
and vCenter Operations Manager has been specially
built to manage these environments. You can use
vCenter Operations Manager to manage future
risk by:

Task 3: Clear away storage bottlenecks by identifying

where they occur

4. Troubleshoot
network performance
Use intelligent analytics
To simplify tracking of performance problems,
vCenter Operations Manager only reports
abnormalities shown in any of the metrics it tracks.
This enables you to monitor large environments,
only drilling down to individual indicators as needed.
For example, investigating a network-related
performance problem starts with looking for any
sudden or sustained change in network demand.
Looking at the workload metrics, it is possible to see
how high the level of demand is and whether this has
just started to happen. By drilling down into the
network indicators, it is then possible to see across
all physical and virtual interfaces in order to identify
where the bottleneck is. Further analysis of the
different indicators then shows if the problem is
affecting all VMs and whether the parent vSphere
host is affected.
Through this type of workflow and analysis, it is
possible to identify network issues and see where
they can be resolved to help optimize performance.

T
 racking various metrics that tell you how much
time remains before a particular resource becomes
a bottleneck.
D
 efining an average profile that identifies how
many VMs you can provision within an optimized
environment.

6. Improve efficiency
Optimize VMs across your existing
environment
Using vCenter Operations Manager, you will have
the visibility and control you need to identify
optimization opportunities such as oversized and
underused VMs. For example, VMs using up large
amounts of virtual disk space can be downsized to
reclaim storage space.
Idle VMs can be powered off, reclaiming capacity
for other projects, optimizing your environment and
making it more efficient, which ultimately affects
bottom line costs associated with energy and IT
resources. Studies have shown that virtualizing with
VMware helps deliver these efficiencies and minimize
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)*.

* Principled Technologies Test Report Summary: Total Cost Comparison:

VMware vSphere vs Microsoft Hyper-V, commissioned by VMware April 2012

Task 6:
Optimize your environment with
automation to turn off idle VMs

Take control of your IT environment

vSphere with Operations Management offers the worlds leading virtualization platform with
insight to IT capacity and performance, enabling you to get even more out of your existing
hardware with confidence. You can also decrease the amount of time spent on troubleshooting
by gaining visibility into the causes of performance bottlenecks and leveraging recommendations
to rectify issues, freeing up resources to drive business growth.

See more. Solve more. Save more.

Go to vmware.com/go/tryvsphere to discover how vSphere
with Operations Management can help you optimize performance
in your virtual environment.

Copyright 2013, VMware Inc.