VMTurbo announced a brand new FREE product to their lineup called Performance and Efficiency Reporter. I'm actually really excited about this release and can't wait to test it out for the Top Ten Free VMware Tools for 2011. If this product is anything like VMTurbo Watchdog, then this product will hit a homerun. The fact that the efficiency reporter uses algoirthms to monitor usage and typical workloads puts it right up there in the next class generation of monitoring tools. And it's free! The performance piece sticks out to me the most by able to see into the CPU Ready Queue and IOPS deliverd without having to be inside ESXTOP. This feature alone makes it worthy of being at the top, but we'll have to wait for the testing. Give it a go and tell us all what you think!
The VMTurbo Performance and Efficiency Reporter package is a collection of reports that fall into two categories.
Performance Reports
- Host/VM Utilization Heat Map contains an ordered ranking of utilization (UI) for both physical hosts as well as virtual machines. Raw data for each host and each VM also is provided. Useful metrics include the peak utilization. This data enables both an “at-a-glance” indicator of workload as well as useful information for provisioning.
- Host Top CPU Ready Queue provides a detailed breakdown of the metric surrounding CPU ready states. By showing both the host total wait times (aggregated over a sample period) and the total times waited by virtual machines for each multiple of vCPUs, the report provides insights into how either a re-allocation of vCPUs or the re-location of a VM would impact this raw performance metric.
- Storage Access IOPS delivers a raw ranked standing of data stores in the environment. By aggregating and displaying the raw average sustained IOPs to and from these datastores, users can evaluate the suitability of the datastore against the applied workload and potentially make a better allocation. Further, by looking at the total storage used (vs. capacity), users are better able to plan for anticipated growth.
Efficiency Reports
- VM Over/Under Provisioning looks at the resources consumed (taking into account historical peaks) to make meaningful recommendations as to right-provisioning. This potentially frees up additional resources that could be re-allocated to improve performance or accommodate additional VMs.
- Storage Wasted Allocations provides immediate visibility into data stored on the managed drives that is not associated with any VM. With this ranked data, users can quickly free up potentially vast amounts of unused storage at a considerable cost saving.
- Storage Allocated to Dormant VMs both identifies dormant VMs and enables the reclamation of their disc space. This can yield significant cost savings through resource reclamation and the ability to subsequently host additional VMs on the same hardware.
- VM Rightsizing Recommendation is based on configurable thresholds as well as analyses of specific time ranges for each VM to make intelligent configuration recommendations based on the actual resource demands of the VM. This ability to intelligently right size represents a significant efficiency improvement over other more wasteful allocation strategies.