vRops

The overhead of running vRops

Have a customer which did insourceing from a large three letter provider. This is in part the story of the benefit to their environment after uninstalling all the three lettered vendor’s software and the other part is to in-lighten you about the load that vRops puts on your environment.

The overhead of running vRops – is small!

Lets find out what is really the cost of running vRops in your vSphere environment! We know how much CPU, Memory, IOPS etc. vRops requires. You have sized your environment, so there should but no doubt about the cost of having vRops running. But what about the cost of actually doing the collection ? vRops talks through vCenter and as such it put loads on it, but how much. As it turns out not a lot…

CPU load is five to ten percent every five minutes for a duration of 30-60 seconds. What about memory then? 40-50 MB every five minutes, that is all. As vCenter is just used as a proxy to get data from the ESXi hosts, no load are put on the vCenter server database and at any time ten to twelve connections are maintained in order to be able to collect the data. To me that seems like a fairly small price to pay, to get this kind of insight into your datacenter.

 

The overhead of running agents – can be high!

The three lettered service provider, had all the agents one could which for running on each and every VM. Meaning that even if the CPU and memory load per VM is low, as these numbers get aggregated, it can sum up to quite a large number. In this case the customer got ten percent capacity back, which is equal to one host in the customers environment. Dependent on the cost of CAPEX and OPEX for your physical server this could be any thing from 10.000 euros to 50.000 euros a year – This is serious money we are talking about. Then compare that to the price and benefit of vRops, the business case should be clear cut.

Below is the data to back up the claim – Just note that the two graphs colors are opposite of each other. I have circled both graphs where the uninstallation of agent happens. Both graphs shows a weeks worth of data.CPU
Memory

With that I’ll leave you with something to think about – Remember that vRops also does storage, network and application monitoring – So there should be even more CPU and memory savings up a head.

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