Make sure VMs don’t exceed host capacity

At the agency where I work we recently bought software products that required new virtual machines, and that provided the opportunity to review some of the important basices of properly assigning the hardware memory and compute to each VM. That’s important so we stay in a failover-ready state, and in our environment, that means appropriately allocating resources of the two clustered physical hosts that run VMs for our production applications. It’s even more important now because the new software is particularly resource-intensive. The task also provided the opportunity to review and adjust the resources assigned to all of our existing virtual servers so they, too, were properly sized. To start the project, an audit of what was already in use across the physical resources was called for to give us a clear picuture of where there was room to create new instances and where there were misallocations of those resources. That exercise was also a great time to resize servers that were underutilized even during peak usage and to decommission servers no longer in use or past the “don’t touch it until we know we won’t need it” period.