A couple of years ago I downloaded and installed a trial of CapacityIQ. It wasn't necessarily the capacity planning for the future capabilities that I was looking for, but more for the under/over sized VM reporting that it included. Honestly, I didn't get a lot of time to evaluate it and all I really did was run a few reports and determine that we were heavily oversizing our VMs. Although I found it useful, I couldn't justify a recommendation to gain budget for just the functionality that CapacityIQ provided.
Fast forward to last year. I now find myself participating in a beta for VCops 1.0. I was extremely excited about this product the first time I seen it at our local Toronto VMUG. Ever since then I've been using VCops on almost a daily basis to monitor and keep track of events and changes within our environment.
And now here we are today with the recent release of VCops 5. This release, now including CapacityIQ reporting and metrics has taken me back in time to those days I was evaluating CapacityIQ by itself. And so I find myself once again looking at those under/over sized VM reports (with a little more time and focus this time around) and kind of scratching my head a bit. A lot of the recommendations it was making around over provisioning vCPU's were correct, however I do have some VMs containing 2 vCPU's that it was recommending to drop to 1. Now I know these VMs need 2 vCPU's as we have ran them with a single vCPU before and the performance just wasn't there. So why is it recommending 2? Well, by default VCops collects usage data of the VMs 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, so when you think about, in this case, these VMs basically do nothing at all during the night and on weekends, but still, there usage data for those off times was being used in the overall calculations, thus, bringing the total average down. Thankfully there is an option to change this, follow the steps below to do so…
Log into VCops and click the 'Configuration' link in the top right hand side of the screen. From there you will be presented with all the configurable options for VCops. Under Planning & Reports click the 'Usage Calculation' link. By default 'All hours on all days' will be selected, meaning VMs usage data is being used 24/7. To change this, simply select 'Specific Hours and Days' (as shown below) and select your desired days and hours…easy!.
There you have it! Your VMs usage outside of the hours and days that you define here will now be excluded in your report calculations. Keep in mind that this is a global setting and will apply to all VMs. There isn't a way to do this on a per-VM basis that I can find, but would probably be beneficial in some cases. These settings are not only useful when trying to exclude idle time, but you can also use them to exclude times when they might be busier than normal (A backup or maintenance window) As always, any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions are more than welcome in the comment box below.
