VMware Host CPU Usage

VMware Host CPU Usage

VMware host CPU usage information is useful in investigating poor performance problems caused by processes taking up too many CPU resources. VMware host CPU usage reports on actively used CPU as a percent of total available CPU on the VMware host machine.

Definition

Active VMware host CPU percent is measured by the ratio of the used CPU to the available CPU, where:

  • Available CPU = # of physical CPUs x clock rate

A fully utilized host will show a value of 100%. Lower percentages indicate less CPU resource utilization.

  • Example: A four-CPU host is running a virtual machine with two CPUs, and the usage is 50%.This means that the host is using two CPUs at 100%.

Without enough CPU resources available, processes running on Oracle VMware, SQL Server on VMware, and other virtual database environments can suffer significant performance degradations.

Solutions

High values may indicate host CPU saturation that could present performance issues for Oracle VMware and SQL Server on VMware databases and applications. This translates to a performance issue if virtual machines are reporting high amounts of Ready Time. If you determine that don't have enough VMware host CPU resources, you must limit the number of processes running concurrently or increase the amount of CPU resources available.

Check the VM Ready Time metric for more information.

Confio IgniteVM

Confio IgniteVM helps identify the impact of host CPU usage for sites running Oracle on VMware, SQL Server on VMware, and other databases. IgniteVM helps DBAs maintain performance and availability on virtual servers. IgniteVM is the only virtualization-aware database monitoring solution.

Learn more about IgniteVM solutions for: