Future saturation recommendation

The Future saturation recommendation detects entities such as virtual clusters and hosts for which the resource usage has already exceeded thresholds or is expected to exceed them. The recommendation is generated by evaluating the natural (organic) growth of resource usage in your cluster due to workloads or deployment of new projects. It is based on the historical trending and extrapolation to the future.

Related topics

Resolving-capacity-risk-and-efficiency-issues-by-using-recommendations

 The Future saturation recommendation is available for VMware vSphere.

The following recommendation details are provided:

  • Number of days that are remaining for the resources saturation
  • Recommended actions to resolve the resource saturation
  • Comparison between the current resource usage and trend and the estimated future usage after reconfiguring the VM
  • Criteria used for generating the recommendation
  • Indicator thresholds used for the recommendation

You can analyze these recommendation details and take the appropriate action to resolve the resource saturation problem.

future_sat_rec_details.png

The recommendation rule is based on the following metrics:

  • CPU Utilization in MHz
  • Memory Utilization %
  • Total datastore space used

The warning threshold values that are configured for these metrics are used for the recommendation. These threshold values can differ for each technology. You can configure them on the Thresholds page in the Helix Capacity Optimization Console.

metrics_on_thresholds_page.png

For more information about configuring thresholds, see Configuring-and-managing-thresholds-for-metrics-and-indicators.

The recommendation state is marked as critical if the resource saturation is expected to occur within the next 7 days or warning if it is expected to occur within the next 8 to 45 days.

You can change these default values on the Rules page in the Helix Capacity Optimization Console.

future_sat_critical_warning_thresholds.png

For more information about modifying the Optimizer rules, see Configuring-and-managing-Optimizer-rules.

The minimum 5 days of data is required to calculate the utilization trend of resources. You can modify this setting on the Thresholds page in the Helix Capacity Optimization Console.

future_sat_historical_trend_setting.png


The following table explains some example scenarios for vSphere clusters when the resource usage can increase and suggested actions to reduce the usage.

Scenario for the increase in the resource usage trend

Suggested actions

Hosts in the vSphere cluster are disconnected or are in the maintenance mode

Troubleshoot the hosts and recover cluster resources.

A cluster has the High Availability (HA) option turned ON.

Troubleshoot the hosts to recover the resources of the cluster and eliminate the future saturation condition.

  • Make sure that the hosts are not unreachable. Otherwise, it can affect the apparent CPU utilization of the cluster.
  • Make sure that none of the hosts has an HA Agent in one of the following states:
    • Uninitialized state: A host could be in this state because it is unable to access the datastores of the cluster.
    • Initialization Error state
    • Uninitialization Error state
    • Host Failed state
  • Make sure that any of the hosts in the HA cluster are not in the failed state. This could happen if the primary (master) host is unable to communicate with a host and is using the datastore heartbeat to verify the connection.
  • A cluster has the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) turned on.
  • Additional hosts are available but not powered on

Remove the condition that prevents an available host from powering on to add resources to the cluster. The condition can occur due to any of these reasons:

  • DRS rules might be preventing VMs from being moved to the available host
  • VMs may be pinned to their current hosts.
  • DRS or Distributed Power Management (DPM) might be set to manual mode, which can result in the failure to apply power-on recommendations.
  • DRS might be disabled on the available host because of a previous failure to exit standby mode.

Storage is saturating soon or is already saturated.

  • Make sure that all datastores in the cluster are visible on the hosts.
  • If the cluster contains old snapshots of VMs or idle or powered-off VMs, remove them to reclaim the disk space.

CPU or memory is saturating soon or is already saturated.

If the cluster contains idle VMs, remove them to reclaim the CPU or memory resources.

A workload (application) running inside a VM is causing high usage.

Troubleshoot (for example, stop runaway processes) or tune the application to reduce its footprint, and then reduce the reservations or limits available to the VM or its parent resource pools to improve the cluster efficiency.



 

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