Top 5 VMware Admin Daily Checks

jonvi

　　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 vSphere  environment to ensure that things are running as they should. Unless  you look each day (or have a daily performance/capacity tool do it for  you), you may take a periodic glance at performance, let’s say, and have  no idea “what’s normal”. Unless a big red siren is going off, chances  are, the infrequent admins wouldn’t recognize if, overnight, memory  utilization (for example) had increased by 80% utilization and  applications were suffering – simply because they didn’t know what to  look 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 hierarchical  manor where the higher you go in the inventory, the more and more  information you get about the objects below. Thus, at the lowest level  (say, the VM level), you’ll only get information about the VM. On the  other hand, at the highest level (the vCenter server level), you’ll get  information 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 vCenter  inventory will tell you what tasks were initiated (their results and who  initiated them) as well as events that happened (their results and who  initiated them). Tasks are things that you initiate (as an admin) and  events 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. These  alarms could alert you to all sorts of things such as high memory  utilization on an ESXi host.

　　Figure 3 – vCenter’s Default Alarms
　　The problem with these alarms is that, by default, they take no  action 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 the  vSphere client open and if you don’t check for them, you will never know  that 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 alarm  to notify you via email (or another option like a SNMP trap to your  infrastructure 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 you  having to configure a notification for each of the alarms in vCenter.
#3 Storage Latency & Capacity
　　While memory is highly utilized in a virtual infrastructure, storage  IOPS (I/Os per second) is usually the second hardest hit resource. And,  even if there is plenty of memory, storage performance can always be a  bottleneck.
　　You need to monitor storage latency to ensure that there isn’t too  much delay for your ESXi hosts to access their storage where virtual  machines and virtual machine swap files are located. If there is too  much delay (latency) then applications in those VMs will slow down.  Unfortunately, I haven’t found a quick way in the vSphere Client GUI to  check 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. The  overview screen on the performance tab for datastores, under the storage  inventory, 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 a  DRS/HA cluster. That cluster will pool (and load-balance, to some  degree) your CPU and memory from all ESXi servers in the cluster. Once  placed in a cluster, you need to keep an eye on your cluster memory and  CPU utilization (no longer do you need to monitor CPU and memory on  individual 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 CPU  utilization. You want to maintain enough capacity for virtual machines  to burst when needed, for virtual machines to be added, or for a host to  fail in the VMHA cluster and the VMs to be restarted on remaining  hosts.
　　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. In  just a few minutes per day, you can make sure that your virtual  infrastructure is running as it should and prevent problems before they  happen.