VMware Rightsizing Saves $780,000 Annually

A business solutions provider in Europe delivers IT, sourcing, and office solutions. To do that, they need top-notch performance across their infrastructure. But they had a problem when it came to their virtual machines.

Struggling with Virtual Machine Performance

Unfortunately for the manager and the organizations his team supported, everything wasn’t okay.

The main challenge his team faced was the sheer volume of servers to manage. They didn’t have an accurate overview. So, they just fixed things when they broke.

That’s not uncommon. According to an industry survey from Kelton Research, more than 80 percent of IT managers said their company lacked proper virtual machine management.

And management of these machines comes with a wide range of issues.

• Understanding which configuration will get the best possible performance 
• Assessing the performance and workload of virtual applications 
• Resolving performance problems easily 
• Comparing the cost effectiveness of different solutions 
• Understanding and diagnosing performance or capacity issue

Right-sizing Virtual Machines Was a Must

The IT Manager knew that rightsizing virtual machines would help his team’s situation. But he still didn’t have the right information to alleviate his customer’s pain.

His team investigated the inner workings of their VMware environment and found two metrics that could help them better understand the performance of their CPU resources—CoStop and %Ready.

This helped, but they didn’t discover the real situation until they combined TeamQuest Performance Indicator (TPI) and the components of response for each of the VMs as workloads of the ESX host.

The moment of clarity happened after the team implemented an unusable help desk tool.

The help desk vendor was unable to pinpoint why the tool couldn’t perform as expected. After several exchanges with the vendor, the IT manager and his team set up a different cluster to prove the problem was overprovisioning.

Saving $65,000/Month—Thanks to VMware Rightsizing

The team discovered they had too many services in queue after their heat map identified hundreds of unhealthy virtual machines.

The rightsizing project helped him and his team reduce the number of under-performing virtual machines from hundreds to four.

After identifying the under-performing virtual machine, the IT manager creates a report that includes metrics such as components of response time. This helps them identify the top potential issues, which are usually performance issues that don’t have enough resources.

The VMware rightsizing project helps his company avoid infrastructure costs that could total $65,000 per month. That kind of cost avoidance generates a lot of goodwill and faith in performance and capacity related decisions. That increased their business status and credibility.

The ability to proactively manage, identify, and resolve potential issues satisfies two essential needs for their business units—managing performance and avoiding issues. Plus, it keeps the phones quiet—and customers happy.