AppSense wrote an interesting paper about workload management in virtual infrastructures, covering quality of service (QoS) and service level agreements (SLAs) concepts:
Workload management is a key concept to fully utilizing the resources available in any server based infrastructure. Allowing your users and applications to get the most out of the CPU, memory and network resource is critical to a stable and responsive environment. This is no different when the environment is virtualized.
As industry continues to raise the bar with higher SLAs issued between IT departments and the rest of the organisation, this paper offers solutions to
increase QoS, meet SLAs and provide much needed optimal system management.In a virtual infrastructure, there are two levels that workload management can be applied; the guest virtual machine and the host server. Individually, they both offer great benefits. Used together, they offer a total solution.
Controlling the guest makes sure that the processes within a virtual machine do not adversely affect each other, and controlling the host server protects the co-habiting virtual machines from contention.AppSense Performance Manager offers a comprehensive workload management solution that will optimize and enhance your VMware ESX and GSX environment.
Using patented Intelligent Process Management™ technologies, AppSense Performance Manager eliminates resource contention at both the guest and host level and optimizes the CPU, memory and network bandwidth resources being used by consolidated applications.
By proactively protecting your virtualized environment from resource hogging, reducing server sprawl and optimizing resource allocation, AppSense
Performance Manager will increase your VMware consolidation ratio and virtual machine response times, maximizing your Return on Investment.
Download it here.