Virtual Machine Performance Management

Virtual machine performance management involves gaining visibility into the inner workings of your VM environment to isolate, solve, and proactively prevent future virtual server performance issues.

Virtualization is a scalable computing solution to help reduce IT costs, increase productivity and agility, and enable more automated processes. However, managing virtual machines can come with challenges. A single virtual server environment can contain numerous virtual machines operating simultaneously on a single computer. With so many moving parts, how can you pinpoint what’s causing virtual machine performance issues? Virtual machine performance management is a strategy used to gather health and status metrics from across your virtual instances.

The virtual machine performance management process works by addressing five key requirements:

1. The need to have a single, unified platform offering critical visibility into the health status configuration, and performance of virtual systems
2. A way to proactively troubleshoot and predict what changes to the network will occur once certain application changes have been made
3. A tool or suite of tools to effectively strike a balance between over-provisioning and under-provisioning resources
4. A way to track how different virtual machines are coexisting on the same host
5. Making any necessary changes to virtual machines and their configurations or infrastructures to facilitate more efficient operations

Using VM monitoring tools to perform virtual machine performance management can help support your ability to perform analysis by gathering metrics from across your systems into a consolidated view. Being proactive about virtual machine performance management by using the right tools can help when problems arise, because you already have the data you need to quickly resolve issues.

While many businesses rely on virtual operating systems and servers to save on hardware costs, if mismanaged, virtual instances can also cause a drag on overall system health. Virtual machine performance management is important because poor VM performance can affect overall business operations.

Following virtual machine management best practices can help keep all VMs within the systems environment healthy. This is critical because although separate VMs aren’t interrelated, they’re interconnected in terms of performance impact. Virtual machine performance management helps IT administrators sustain optimal operating conditions, pinpoint performance issues, eliminate bottlenecks, and troubleshoot VMs more effectively.

Searching through thousands of counters and metrics by hand to discover virtual machine performance issues and manually managing a shared pool of virtual resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network) can be time-consuming as well as error-prone. Virtual machine monitoring tools can help IT administrators optimize and streamline virtual server monitoring and resource management by automating many of the most laborious processes. These tools also offer centralized platforms to facilitate faster analysis and reporting.

Here are 10 important metrics and performance issues virtual machine monitoring tools should help track:

1. Memory ballooning
2. VM sprawl
3. Memory swapping
4. Old VM snapshots
5. VM disk read
6. General hardware health
7. General usage and distribution of VM resources
8. VM Wait and Ready times
9. Network connectivity
10. Datastore capacity and resource availability

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed to be an all-inclusive virtualization performance monitoring tool to help IT administrators drill down on important aspects involved in managing a virtualization system, including monitoring, performance management, resource allocation, and overall optimization. This tool is also built to handle VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments both on-premises and in the cloud.

The intuitive dashboards in VMAN are designed to offer unmatched visibility into your systems environment, which can help you highlight performance bottlenecks and allow for detailed deep drills into issues. Virtualization Manager can also be integrated with the AppStack and PerfStack dashboards to help you tap into a more detailed view of application and infrastructure performance.

Managing a shared pool of virtual resources can be challenging for enterprises going through a growth period, but the storage I/O performance metrics and alerts in VMAN are built to help make capacity planning easier. SolarWinds VMAN also offers detailed past performance configurations information to help you find and correlate performance issues, with many additional capabilities to help you keep your virtual environments healthy and running at full capacity.