System Sizing Guidelines for Integrity Virtual Machines Deployment -- Hardware Consolidation with Integrity Virtual Machines

15
Computing the Storage Capacity for the VM Deployment
Storage capacity for each VM has no appreciable overhead. Therefore the VM needs exactly the
storage needed for the application stack (including the operating system) to be run on that VM. In
this regard, storage sizing is identical to that of physical servers.
As mentioned above, the VM Host requires a minimum of approximately 24GB of disk space.
Hence, the total storage is the sum of the aggregate required by the virtual machines and that of
the VM Host:
Physical Mass Storage ≥ (aggregate VM mass storage) + (VM Host mass storage)
Using the example outlined above, we have:
Physical Mass Storage ≥ 550 GB + 24 GB = 574 GB
Consolidating Workloads on the VM Host
The following examples show how to stack the workloads so that they do not exceed any particular
utilization threshold.
Note that these examples assume the workloads are sensitive to I/O bandwidth, not necessarily to
response time requirements. If response times are critical, then one will need to accommodate I/O
operations per second rather than bandwidth. In doing so, the number of I/O adapters will need
to be sized for that requirement.
Stacking Workloads - Example 1
Consider an Integrity server with a single CPU, single NIC, and a single disk available to the virtual
machines. The three candidates for consolidation have random spikes in utilization. The average
expected utilizations of the new server‟s hardware components are given in Table 1.
Table 1- Average expected utilizations workloads in Example 1.
Workload
CPU
Utilization
I/O Storage
Utilization
I/O Network
Utilization
A
10
5
20
B
20
10
15
C
30
30
20
TOTAL
60
45
55
Not all three of these workloads can be consolidated on the new server without adding other
hardware components (another CPU, disk, or NIC). However, any two of them can be located on
the same physical server because none of the possible aggregate utilizations would exceed the
suggested thresholds.