To help you manage your virtual infrastructure, Snow Commander tracks the average and peak capacity of your hosts and clusters. This data is used to make the best choice for deployment placement and to provide operators with the information shown on the Capacity solution page.

VM Workloads

Commander measures capacity in VM workloads, which are operational baselines for how much CPU, Memory and Storage are expected to be consumed by a VM. The VM workload as configured out of the box is:
 

• CPU (GHZ): 0.5
• Memory (GB): 0.5
• Storage (GB): 8.0

You can edit the values to reflect your organization's standards, or alternatively have the average calculated by Commander. 

To update the global values:

1. Under the Configuration menu, choose System Configuration.
2. Switch to the Capacity tab.
3. Under Global Capacity Defaults click Edit.
4. Select one of the following options:
   1. Choose Automatically calculate average VM workload, providing an appropriate Sample period in days. 
   2. Choose Use typical VM workload and provide appropriate vlaues for CPU, Memory, and Storage. 
5. Optionally, switch to the Additional Reserves tab and provide a percentage of available CPU and Memory to exclude from capacity. This leaves overhead for future growth or unexpected resource spikes. 
6. Click OK. 

1. Choose a cluster or host with which to work. You can only configure the override for a standalone host or a cluster, not each host in a cluster.
2. Right-click the cluster or host and choose Set Capacity Defaults.
3. Choose Use Overridden VM Workload and enter the values you want for the cluster or host. Alternatively, select Calculate Average to populate the fields based on averages across the previous 7 days.
4. Click OK,

Constraining Resource

In most cases, whenever Commander reports remaining capacity to users, it will also indicate the constraining resource. Constraining resources show whether the capacity is most limited by the available CPU, memory or storage space available for new virtual machines.
 

Looking at the chart above, the remaining capacity for the five stand-alone hosts represented is 71 VM workloads, constrained by memory. This means there is storage space and CPU available for more than 71 VMs, but the memory available will limit the placement of further VMs, to help you avoid over-provisioning and impacting your users.
 

You can view all the hosts under a single cloud account by selecting the cloud account and switching to the Hosts tab. This view provides an excellent overview of the capacity of each host and what its constraining resources are. As with any listgrid in Commander you can add many useful columns, including one that will display to which cluster the host belongs.
 

Updating Capacity

Capacity information is updated when:

• A cloud account is connected or disconnected
• A cluster or host is added
• You manually update capacity by choosing Update Performance and Capacity for a cluster or host

Capacity information is not updated when:

• You update the global value for Typical VM Workload
• You override Typical VM Workload for a cluster or host