Determining Vm usage

[jfierberg]

What indicators could be used to detemine if a vm is being actively used? I am trying to audit our vms and remove any unused VMs.

[mcowger]

CPU below X%? Memory usage below like a gig? no IOPS?

--Matt

[gary1012]

If they're Windows VMs, could you enable audit account logon events for both success and failure to see if anyone/anything is logging in from within the guest OS?

The alternative is to turn them off and see who screams.

[RParker]

The method I use is to install sysinternals Bginfo.

With this tool (which is free) you can add it to the login/startup of Windows VM's and report every time someone logs in (which is about the only way to tell if it's being used) and report it to a CSV file or a SQL Server, then once a month I check the logs for oldest machines which have not logged in in a while, and I investigate or shut down those VM's.

The nice side affect of using this tool is it reports everything from FREE disk space, memory configurations, the last login, machine names, ,OS version (including SP), IP address, so if you add it to ALL the VM's like we do, we get a nice little inventory in addition.

[jfierberg]

I have been running a report against the event that shows RDP access but for servers that are not accessed via RDP I want to make sure they are still being used.

[RParker]

CPU below X%? Memory usage below like a gig? no IOPS?

Those are inefficient ways. CPU, we have many VM's that are used daily which barely register (web servers) but people use them. Memory usage also is not determinent. IOPS, how would you monitor this? Unless you pay for a tool that can track IOPS, it's not very helpful. Also Windows (at least all Servers) has a page file, which get's used regardless of VM usage, so IOPS will remain constant.

Do you actually use these to determine idle VM's in your environment?

[mcowger]

They are effcient for us.

IOPS is the strongest indicator for us. Something thats not hit its disk muhc in the last 30 days isn't being used.

--Matt

[jfierberg]

is there a counter for this?

[mcowger]

Yup. Accessible via VC or esxtop.

--Matt

[jfierberg]

Alright. Is there a powershell command that can get the numbers? Also is there a IOPS threshold in kbps that I should look for?

[mcowger]

We dont use powershell (or windows really) so I dont know.

But IOPS is a counter value, not a throughput (kbps) value.

We generally look for it to be under .1 IOPS on average (over a few days), but thats entirely dependent on YOUR environement.

--Matt

[jfierberg]

Are you using esxtop to monitor this?

[jfierberg]

Does KBps work?