5.6

Using the Density Badge Under the Efficiency Badge
The vCenter Operations Manager Density badge measures consolidation ratios to assess cost savings. You can
assess the behavior and performance of a virtual machine and related applications to maximize the
consolidation ratio without affecting the performance or service level agreements.
The density score is the ratio of the actual density to an ideal density based on the demand, the amount of
virtual capacity, and the amount of physical usable capacity. Density calculates the amount of resources that
you can provision before contention or conflict for a resource occurs between objects. The ratios account for
the number of virtual machines to host, the number of virtual CPUs to physical CPU, and the amount of virtual
memory to physical memory.
The Density score ranges between 0 (bad) and 100 (good). The badge changes its color based on the badge
score thresholds that are set by the vCenter Operations Manager administrator.
Table 2-13. Object Density States
Badge Icon Description User Action
The resource consolidation is
good.
No attention required.
Some resources are not fully
consolidated.
Select Planning > Views to
identify resource consolidation
opportunities.
The consolidation for many
resources is low.
Select Planning > Views to
identify resource consolidation
opportunities.
The resource consolidation is
extremely low.
Select Planning > Views to
identify resource consolidation
opportunities.
No data is available for any of
the metrics for the time period.
The object is offline.
A vCenter Operations Manager administrator can change the badge score thresholds. For example, a green
Density badge can indicate a score above 40 instead of 25, as set by default.
Working with Metrics and Charts on the All Metrics Tab
You can check the location of an object in the hierarchy and select metrics to view graphs of their historic values
for a period you define.
You can use the panes on the All Metrics tab under the Operations tab to search metrics and view metric
graphs.
The Health Tree Pane
The Health Tree pane displays the location of the currently selected object in the hierarchy of your virtual
infrastructure. You can check all parent and child objects related to the currently selected object.
For example, the sample hierarchy shows the parent and child objects in the virtual infrastructure. The red
icon indicates a presence of a potential problem in the vCenter Server object. You can investigate the probable
cause of the problem from the Dashboard tab.
Chapter 2 Beginning to Monitor the Virtual Environment
VMware, Inc. 21