Posted by If you are fortunate enough in your career you will have the opportunity to sit in capacity planning meetings. After showing how much your environment is growing and the required hardware to meet demand will sometimes receive push back when you present the price tag for the additional resources. Eventually, someone will ask is there any way to reclaim resources or collapse environments? That is why I like the vRealize Operations Optimization Report – Idle Virtual Machines report.
vRealize Operations Report – Idle Virtual Machines Report
vRealize Operations report will list of the virtual machines which are marked as idle due to lack of CPU, Memory or Network activity. Plan to power off and eventually delete these virtual machines to reclaim CPU, Memory and Disk Space.
After you generate the Optimization Report
Once this report is generated in both PDF and CSV you can take the list of VMs and compare against tags, annotation field, or your preferred tracking method to identify the application owners. This gives you the ability to reach out to the APP owner with the names of their VMs and inquire why their VMs are idle. They may have a valid business case for only utilizing the VMs a period of the year. These APPs may be better suited for the public cloud. You may also discover that these VMs were used for a project that has been completed and the VMs have never been decommissioned. In any case, you should now have data about these VMs to take to leadership to either begin the decommission process or new discussions on whether onprem is the right place for these workloads.
How to Generate the Optimization Report – Idle Virtual Machines
Click on dashboards at the top of the screen
Scroll down the left plane and select Reports
Go to the upper right hand corner and type in idle and enter to filter by idle
Click the ellipsis button then run
Now select an object, if you want all ide VMs in your environment then click vSphere World but if you want to know a particular environment then select your way through vCenter Adapter
Once report is run click on Generated Reports and it will take you to all the reports you ran.
Now you can download either the PDF or CSV or both.
Summary:
I find leveraging the Utilization Report can save a lot of hassle of scripting or manually going and determining all the idle resources in your VMWare environment. As always, I hope y’all found this article useful.