VKernel has released a study on virtual infrastructure management, titled: Virtualization Management Index. The report which contains 6 pages is written by Bryan Semple, who is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel.
The study uses data drawn from over 2,500 virtualized environments representing over 550,000 virtual machines, the first Virtualization Management Index (VMI) details a significant resource under-utilization in virtualized environments. If not corrected, this resource underutilization represents a ROI risk factor as companies move to virtualize more mission critical applications.
Some of the most marked under-utilization of resources included:
• Average VM densities of just 2 VMs per core
• Allocated/actual memory of just 0.7
• Over 40% of all VMs had over allocated CPU and memory
Specifically, all gains in VM density per host were mainly due to increasing core densities delivered by the hardware manufacturers and not related to improvement in capacity management processes.
The VMI currently shows a consolidation efficiency of 15.6 VMs per host, where currently memory is the limiting factor for more consolidation. Currently system administrators allocate 70% of the available memory to their VM’s leaving 30% in reserve.
On the CPU side, the ration of allocated to actual CPU is 2.2, which means that more CPUs cycles are allocated than physically available due to very low CPU utilization of most applications.
Conclusion:
"…The VMI yields a glimpse into virtualization. Memory density continues to hamper increases in VM density. Enterprises should perform extensive TCO analysis to determine if extreme memory densities are a worthwhile investment to increase VM density and lower server count…"