vCops: Does it really need X amount of RAM to run?

Deathmage

Hey guys,

So I've scaled back our vCops vApp on our cluster to 6 GB's of each since I really can't grasp why a application NEEDS that much resources but after reading an article on Manny' blog from Jan 17th; I'm kind of curious if vROps/vCOPS should be sized correctly as in IE it's own datastore and sufficient memory.

I'm curious to see why this application that literally just sits there and collects data needs 7 and 9 GB's respectful as defaults for memory and/or if it's advisable to plant the VM's on there own datastore on a storage array separate from the normal VM datastore.

I'm sure this question is more in-line with a VCAP DCD pursuit which I'm not taking for a while but I'm still intrigued...

Essendon

Yeah it's a VMware recommendation to have X amount of RAM, primarily to allow those massive reports to run and allow multiple people to log on and do what they need to. You could get by with lowering the RAM, find a sweet spot and you should be okay.

As for an own datastore on the same array for vROps - each datastore is a queue on the adapter. Separating vROps into its own queue can make things better, how much of a difference though is subjective. If you arent seeing any performance issues, dont worry about it. Dont go bonkers with separating every VM on its datastore too, there's a limit on the number you can have (256 I think) on a host. In addition, there's queue depth considerations to look at. Check this link from 'da man' himself.

SimonD.

I guess it's also going to depend on how active your environment is, if you have a fairly static environment that doesn't see much in the way of VM creation \ deletion etc then you can perhaps look at the metrics on the VM's and downgrade them.

If however you're using something like vCD or vRA for rapid deployments you may find that you need that ram.

To give you an idea, I have vROps 6 installed in my home lab, it's an environment that's got no more than 20 VMs running in it and ram usage for the vROps VM is no more than 2GB.

When possible I would investigate vROps 6 as this moves to a single VM rather than the UI and Analytics VMs (although leave it until 6.0.1 as that fixes some issues with 6.0) and also allows for smaller deployments (8GB default size for Extra Small).

Deathmage

SimonD. wrote: »

I guess it's also going to depend on how active your environment is, if you have a fairly static environment that doesn't see much in the way of VM creation \ deletion etc then you can perhaps look at the metrics on the VM's and downgrade them.

If however you're using something like vCD or vRA for rapid deployments you may find that you need that ram.

To give you an idea, I have vROps 6 installed in my home lab, it's an environment that's got no more than 20 VMs running in it and ram usage for the vROps VM is no more than 2GB.

When possible I would investigate vROps 6 as this moves to a single VM rather than the UI and Analytics VMs (although leave it until 6.0.1 as that fixes some issues with 6.0) and also allows for smaller deployments (8GB default size for Extra Small).

Ironically, I'm only running the vROps at home (VMUG Advantage Subscription) as-well only at 3 GB's of both of them and it seems to work fine and I got about 20 VM's myself for 4 windows-forests but there isn't much traffic really going on them; it's merely proof-of-concept labs. I guess that's what really made me question the larger memory needs for the default vApp. Wasn't sure if that was meant as just a generic setting or like a hard standard regardless of the size of your cluster.