A little while back I did a blog post discussing how impressed I was with some reports which were available for VMware Host systems but aren’t available for Hyper-V Host systems entitled Oversized and undersized VMs plus one IT geek meltdown. The main purpose of the blog post was to a practical example of how beneficial it can be to see what VM’s in an environment are either oversized or undersized. I received a lot of good feedback on this blog post including several recommendations about how to gain insights into the capacity available for Hyper-V servers. I decided to take these ideas, test tem in my lab environment and write them up in a series of blog posts. So here we go with the first one – using Veeam One to report on Hyper-V capacity!
My environment:
One hyper-V host (HyperV02), and one Hyper-V cluster (HyperV03 and HyperV05). I recently re-architected my environment to use an SMB 3.0 file share which is hosting most of the virtuals running on HyperV03 and HyperV05. HyperV02 is also a host which runs a minimal number of virtual machines.
Where to download it? Veeam One is available for download at http://www.veeam.com/virtual-server-management-one-free.html?ad=menu
What requirements are there to integrate it with Hyper-V?
Veeam One can connect to a System Center Virtual Machine manager, a cluster or a Hyper-V host. For my environment I configured it to communication with my VMM server which required the installation of the VMM Console on the server I was installing Veeam One one.
What were the results for my Hyper-V lab environment?
Veeam One installs multiple components including the Veeam ONE Business view, Veeam ONE Monitor, and Veeam ONE reporter as shown below.
Veeam ONE Monitor
Veeam ONE monitoring provided some interesting insights into my drives and latency associated with them.
The disk showing high read and write latencies is the primary drive used by my virtuals so while this is expected it is somewhat disappointing. Currently this drive is a storage space using four drives, but with my upgrade to 2012 R2 my plan is to add an SSD to the storage space to assist with this going forward.
Additional views provided insights into guest virtual machines including the processor, memory and network information as shown below.
And provided insights into the amount of resource currently being consumed (processor, memory, network, disk) by the hosts.
Veeam ONE Reporter
Veeam ONE Reporter includes a series of reports including a couple of very interesting ones around Hyper-V capacity planning which are the focus of this blog post.
Host Failure Modelling
This report identified the resources available and how many resources would be required if a host were to fail in my environment. It identified the amount of memory was expected to be utilized and how much memory would be required to provide the ability to handle loss of a host system.
Over-provisioned Datastores
The over-provisioned datastores report identified which of my drives had capacity allocated and capacity available. My virtual systems run primarily on the HyperV02 server on the X drive which will need additional capacity going forward (its currently showing 47 days until it will run out of disk space).
Infrastructure Growth (flash)
There are also some cool reports which used flash to show the layout for VM’s and what hosts they were running as shown below.
Infrastructure Overview (Visio)
Finally, the Infrastructure Overview report provided a quick way to quickly document how your Hyper-V environment is configured. The results in my lab were quite intuitive and mapped out my lab environment in an easy to understand Visio style view shown below.
Summary: Veeam ONE provided some excellent insights into my Hyper-V environment both to document the configuration and to provide capacity planning for my environment going forward. If you have a Hyper-V environment I would recommend that you check this one application out!