Monitoring the performance of Oracle Virtual Machine environment

Oracle VM is a platform that provides a fully equipped environment to better leverage the benefits of virtualization technology. Oracle VM enables you to deploy operating systems and application software within a supported virtualization environment. PATROL for Solaris monitors the configured Oracle VM Manager and it's associated inventory, like Repositories, Oracle VM Servers, and it's virtual machines. The following metrics help you to monitor your Oracle VM environment in an efficient manner.

CPU Utilization (Oracle VM Server and Virtual Machine)

This attribute displays the percentage of CPU utilization. High CPU utilization on the Oracle VM Server indicates that the overall server CPU utilization is more and the server might cause performance issues. High CPU utilization on the virtual machine indicates that the particular VM needs attention. You might want to check the number of processes running on the VM.

Set threshold on this attribute to get notified about the processor utilization on the virtual machines and physical computer. Consider setting up an alert to trigger if the total run time is less than 20 percent or more than 90 percent.Memory Utilization (Oracle VM Server and Virtual Machine)

Memory Utilization (Oracle VM Server and Virtual Machine)

Memory utilization attribute measures the amount of memory utilized in percent. A low memory indicates that you might soon run out of memory resulting in critical performance issues. One or more servers might stop responding in such scenarios if the available memory is too less to accommodate virtual machines. A fair amount of free memory indicates that you can add more virtual machines on this host, thereby distributing the load from other hosts. For more information about this attribute, see [Memory Utilization attribute page.

For a virtual machine, this attribute indicates that the percent allocation of memory from Server against the configured memory. If VM is configured with 1 GB of memory and if server has allocated all of the memory to VM. Its utilization will be reported as 100%. Note that you cannot see how the VM is using this allocated memory. It might be possible that some memory is unused by the VM.

Set threshold on this attribute to get notified about the memory available on the host in MB. Consider setting up an alert to trigger if the available memory is less than 20 percent or more than 60 percent.

Used (Virtual Machine Disk)

Used space represents the percent of actual allocated space against the configured disk space for the VM. In case of sparse allocation this attribute is useful to identify how much amount of disk space is actually used by VM. This can be useful to fine tune the storage allocation of virtual machine. For example: If this value is too low you can consider configuring lower amount of disk space to the VM.

Set threshold on this attribute to get notified about the used disk space of the VM. Consider setting up an alert to trigger if the disk space is less than 20 percent. The KM generates an alarm and triggers an event when the threshold values are met. 

Suggested action

The KM event indicates that you might want to check the allocated disk space of the VM.

Utilization and Free (Storage Device)

The Utilization attribute displays the space utilized by the storage repositories configured on the Oracle VM Manager. This attribute can be used in combination with the Free attribute that displays the free space available on the storage device.

Consider setting up an alert to trigger if the utilization and free space values are less than 20 percent or more than 80 percent.