Top 5 VMware Admin Daily Checks
Whether you are a new VMware Admin or you have some experience, you may not know what you should be checking, each day, in your VMware vSphereenvironment to ensure that things are running as they should. Unlessyou look each day (or have a daily performance/capacity tool do it foryou), you may take a periodic glance at performance, let’s say, and haveno idea “what’s normal”. Unless a big red siren is going off, chancesare, the infrequent admins wouldn’t recognize if, overnight, memoryutilization (for example) had increased by 80% utilization andapplications were suffering – simply because they didn’t know what tolook for.Here are the top 5 daily checks that every VMware Admin should look at, each day:
#1 Events and Tasks
The vCenter hosts and VMs inventory is organized in a hierarchicalmanor where the higher you go in the inventory, the more and moreinformation you get about the objects below. Thus, at the lowest level(say, the VM level), you’ll only get information about the VM. On theother hand, at the highest level (the vCenter server level), you’ll getinformation about every object in the inventory (datacenters, clusters,hosts, resource pools, and VMs).
The tasks and events tab on each of the objects in the vCenterinventory will tell you what tasks were initiated (their results and whoinitiated them) as well as events that happened (their results and whoinitiated them). Tasks are things that you initiate (as an admin) andevents are results of tasks (sub tasks) or system-initiated events.
Figure 1 – vSphere Tasks and Events at the vCenter Level
You can sort the columns to show the type and status you are looking for on the top. For example, here you can see all the events that had warnings are shown first:
Figure 2 – vSphere Tasks and Events at the vCenter Level
#2 vCenter Alarms
By default, vCenter has 50+ alarms defined when installed. Thesealarms could alert you to all sorts of things such as high memoryutilization on an ESXi host.
Figure 3 – vCenter’s Default Alarms
The problem with these alarms is that, by default, they take noaction other than a warning or alert in the vSphere Client. By default,they send no email or other notification. Thus, if you don’t have thevSphere client open and if you don’t check for them, you will never knowthat your virtual infrastructure is in trouble.
So, you either need to go in and check for triggered alarms at the highest level, each day, go in and configure each alarmto notify you via email (or another option like a SNMP trap to yourinfrastructure monitoring system) or use a third-party tool.
One of the free tools that I like for alarm monitoring is Xtravirt’s free vAlarm.It has a desktop balloon popup for any triggered alarm, without youhaving to configure a notification for each of the alarms in vCenter.
#3 Storage Latency & Capacity
While memory is highly utilized in a virtual infrastructure, storageIOPS (I/Os per second) is usually the second hardest hit resource. And,even if there is plenty of memory, storage performance can always be abottleneck.
You need to monitor storage latency to ensure that there isn’t toomuch delay for your ESXi hosts to access their storage where virtualmachines and virtual machine swap files are located. If there is toomuch delay (latency) then applications in those VMs will slow down.Unfortunately, I haven’t found a quick way in the vSphere Client GUI tocheck storage latency without going into each of your datastores in the Datastores inventory and clicking on the Performance tab. For example, here is the average write latency per virtual machine.
Figure 4 – Average Write Latency per VM
Instead of monitoring storage latency through the vSphere Client, a nice free tool for storage latency monitoring is vKernel’s Capacity View that shows high storage latency (and other performance capacity issues). Alternatively, third-party tools like VMware vCenter Operations Suite (vCOPS) and vKernel’s vOPS.
Storage capacity, on the other hand, is very easy to monitor. Theoverview screen on the performance tab for datastores, under the storageinventory, is a good resource for storage capacity monitoring.
Figure 5 – Storage Capacity Monitoring
#4 Cluster Memory Utilization
You’ll get the most out of your virtual infrastructure by using aDRS/HA cluster. That cluster will pool (and load-balance, to somedegree) your CPU and memory from all ESXi servers in the cluster. Onceplaced in a cluster, you need to keep an eye on your cluster memory andCPU utilization (no longer do you need to monitor CPU and memory onindividual hosts).
To monitor cluster memory utilization, go to the cluster level and to the performance tab.
Figure 6 – Monitoring Cluster Memory Utilization
#5 Cluster CPU Utilization
Just like cluster memory utilization, you need to monitor cluster CPUutilization. You want to maintain enough capacity for virtual machinesto burst when needed, for virtual machines to be added, or for a host tofail in the VMHA cluster and the VMs to be restarted on remaininghosts.
To monitor cluster CPU utilization, go to the cluster level, to the performance tab, and then view the CPU graph in the overview view:
Figure 7 – Monitoring Cluster CPU Utilization
Summary
As a VMware Admin, you never want to have an outage on your watch. Injust a few minutes per day, you can make sure that your virtualinfrastructure is running as it should and prevent problems before theyhappen.
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