Datastore Performance and Datastore Statistics Tabs in vOPS Server Standard

Two of the most useful tabs in vOPS Server Standard for any virtual infrastructure engineer are the Datastore Performance and Datastore Statistics tabs.

In vCenter, it is a bit of a challenge to get information on datastore performance and statistics. You have to click into each individual datastore to get this information and drill down deeper to get performance detail. For datastore statistics, you'll only get Capacity and Free metrics. By double clicking into a datastore, you can get the Provisioned metric.

Also, many companies have separate storage teams. In order to get detailed performance information, you will need to engage members of the Storage team. This can be time consuming in many companies, because everyone is busy and you might not get an answer right away.

vOPS Server Standard provides what I like to term "one stop shopping" views of your datastore performance and datastore statistics and the information is very easy to get to. The Datastore Performance tab is right under Performance Analyzer. You can get information about all of your datastores on one page, showing Throughput, IOPS, and Latency performance metrics. You can also report from this screen via .XML, .CSV, .PDF, you can email it, and you can schedule it. You can sort by any column. By selecting each datastore and double clicking it, you can find further information about the virtual machines using that storage. This can be quite handy when asked to troubleshoot poor application performance and looking to rule out storage as a potential issue.

The Datastore Statistics tab can be found right under Capacity Manager. This tab will show you Total Space, Allocated, Free Space, Reserved VM Storage, Committed, Utilized, Average IOPS, Host Counted VM Count, and Reserved VM Count. Similar to Datastore Performance, you can report this tab and drill into each datastore to examine the virtual machines being hosted on a datastore. You can sort by any column.

In Datastore Statistics, the most useful column is the Committed column. With the advent of Thin Provisioning, many companies are merely guessing as to how overprovisioned they are with their storage. The Committed column will show you how much of the storage is "committed' by %. It's common to find datastores utilizing Thin Provisioning that are 130% committed. This is immensely helpful to an engineer trying to keep from overcommitting his storage and filling up a datastore.

By utilizing these two easily accessible tabs in vOPS Server Standard, you can better manage your storage performance and provisioning.