By Scott Lowe, Special to ZDNet Asia
For a high-level overview of the health of your virtual environment, check out VKernel's free Capacity View tool.
Back in the days of the physical server, an administrator purchasing a server would size a server with plenty of RAM, disk and processor for a server's long life. In many cases, computing resources were over-provisioned in an attempt to make sure that potentially growing resource needs would not max out the resources of the new server. While over-provisioning resources cost a little extra money on the front end, upgrading a server mid-cycle tended to be pretty expensive.
How times have changed.
The era of virtualization is in full swing, and over-provisioning servers--now in the form of virtual machines (VMs)--is not only unnecessary since resources can be added on-the-fly, but it also has a significant cost.
For example, every unnecessary gigabyte of RAM added to a VM is a gigabyte of RAM taken from the central resource pool that can't be added to some other needy VM. The same goes for disk space and processor.
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