Have you ever needed to execute a change control but leadership is concerned about off hours work impacting offshore team. Wouldn’t it be awesome if in a matter of a minute in vROPs you could see your cluster utilization? I know there are plenty of ways to gather this information from a multitude of tools but I find vROPs is the quickest way for me personally.
View workload % How to:
Environment > vSphere Environment > vSphere Hosts and Clusters
In the left plane navigate to the vCenter > DataCenter > Host & Cluster you desire
In the left plane you need to drop down the All Metrics tab
—FYI; if you want more than the default 7 days you can click on the calendar next to the settings cog and change the time ratio
Drop down CPU > Workload & double click to move into data plane
Next rinse and repeat any additional metrics or same metric from a different cluster to compare and contrast
If you really want to have some fun I like to look at historical information. The default for the data displayed is 7 days. What if we wanted to compare these past 7 days with the previous week or two weeks ago?
Click on the calendar. In my example I want to compare the last 3 weeks in my environment.
As you can see we are now displaying the past 3 weeks but separately. This doesn’t give you the best idea of anomalies.
Click the split charts button and let the magic happen
As you can see the charts are now overlapping, which makes it easier to see spikes. Should you hover over any data point it will show you your utilization over those three data periods.
Summary:
I hope this quick article reflects how fast you can pull utilization reports of workloads running in your environment. Also, I find it a quick way to compare different workloads to understand peak utilization hours in your environment.