How to Resolve Capacity Bottlenecks and Ensure Great Performance in Your VMware ESX Environment

As we are writing this paper, the overwhelming majority of organizations are migrating and consolidating their servers from physical to virtual environments. While the savings of the virtualized data center are extremely compelling, there is now a new set of challenges that System Administrators did not have to deal with in the physical world. One of the challenges is getting used to the fact that all hardware resources: CPU, memory, storage and network utilization are shared between virtual machines. This means that applications and users can impact each other and therefore resource monitoring becomes really important. Put another way if you don't closely monitor resource consumption by each virtual machine and simply keep adding more virtual machines without doing analysis on how this will impact all four core resources, the result will be bad performance and even system downtime. Ultimately, this means unhappy users and dissatisfied managers. So, you need to find a way to prevent this problem.