We see the growth in the market to be more aggressive for consolidation in the data center for both physical and virtual server from time to time. There are plenty of solutions in place allow blade to support virtualization today such as virtual connect from HP, pass through module, infiniband integration Xsigo, Cisco UCS and etc. This had significant resolved the I/O interfaces require per blade to host the virtualization host server. CPU and memory per blade and significant increase with the latest release from all the major server vendors, the CPU, memory and disk I/O are no longer the concerns for virutalization.
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Many of you may had noticed the changes in vSphere 4 if you had previously implemented or managed any of the virtual environment running vmware infrastructure. VMware had converted every license file we previously own to a new license key which allow us to apply to the vSphere hosts we had in our environment. If you had sign up the SNS previously, you will be entitled for an upgrade and under the license portal of your official log in ID that previously register with the license you bought, you will notice the new licenses key provided once you log on. Generally, the way of managing the CPU licenses will no longer be the previos method as we did in ESX 3.5.
As virtualization does help us to consolidate virtual machines into physical servers, we are always looking into a better consolidation ratio and hardware utilization. We may not want to achieve this by hitting to performance issue on the virtual infrastructure. Here is 1 of the way you may consider to improve the utilization on your ESX host.
As my environment, the virtual infrastructure are supporting our global business in Asia Pacific, EMEA and NA time zone. When I tracked back the performance history and found the busy hour for most of the machines will be different. Due to the time zone different, I notice that the hardware utilization on the ESX host are always remain 40 to 50 % all the time.
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If we refer to the current version which is ESX 3.5 u3, the maximum number of Vcpu per ESX server is 192 per ESX Servers. Personally, I think the number of Vcpu per ESX servers is too minimal. Imagine if we do run a servers with 4 or 8 physical CPU sockets and we consolidate 40 : 1 Physical server in our virtualization environment, we will hit to the bottleneck on maximum numbers of Vcpu per ESX servers but not due to the CPU consumption.I hope VMWare should revise the configuration to greater number or 256 Vcpu per ESX servers.
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Been a while we all working on virtualization for consolidation purpose, I am sure that 1 of the biggest selling point we always remind the customers and management is we will able to fully utilize the investment we put in for the servers in our data center with virtualization in place. Most of the time, we may still not 100% utilize the servers capacity due to some consideration of High Availability and Performance issues.
Here I am interesting to show 1 of the screen shot I capture during my stress test on the ESX host for our production machine which hit to 100% of the CPU utilization on the ESX host level.
Click the picture above for full view
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