The Performance Cost of SMP – The

Reason for Rightsizing

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Mark Achtemichuk

Rightsizing is an important operational process that does affect performance.  VMware

recognizes this and recommends the use of vCenter Operations to assist in identifying
under/oversized workloads within your infrastructures.  The value of rightsizing helps to
ensure maximum performance of your workloads and the efficient use of your underlying
hardware.  It is very easy today to add resources to a virtual machine when required so we
need to get away from our habit of over provisioning.

Many often wonder if there is overhead when creating a large virtual machine with many
vCPUs that may or may not be used.  Is there waste in doing that?  Why not make all my
virtual machines excessive and let the vSphere scheduler sort it out?

Well the simple answer is that – yes – if you build an inefficient virtual machine with too
many vCPUs that will not be used, there is waste.  If the workload is rightsized though, you
will still maintain a high level of efficiency.

Let’s take a look at the data:

Here we did a simple lab test using a single threaded CPU intensive process as the fixed
workload.  The benchmark was then run using multiple virtual machines with different
vCPU configurations.  Each VM was only running a single thread of the CPU intensive
process, but additional vCPU’s were assigned to the virtual machine and left idle,
simulating an oversizing of the virtual machine.
The resulting data demonstrates that ‘CPU Efficiency’ decreases as the virtual machines
were assigned additional idle vCPUs.  This highlights that fact that there is some small
amount of waste but that it doesn’t become visible until very large virtual machine
configurations are under-utilized.

Next, we repeated the same benchmark but this time ensured that each additional vCPU
that was assigned to the virtual machine was also running the CPU intensive process.  This
simulated a rightsized virtual machine that was using all vCPU’s.

The resulting data demonstrates that ‘CPU Efficiency’ was constant as the virtual machines
were scaled up.  This highlights that fact that there is no measurable waste when virtual
machines are in fact using all of their assigned vCPUs.

Special thanks to my teammate Joey Dieckhans for this data.  Please note this experiment
was meant to solely demonstrate scheduler efficiency with a purely CPU intensive
workload. When you start to consider the additional impact of storage, memory or network
it becomes more important to rightsize to maintain efficiency and reduce waste.

The takeaway here is that we should strive to rightsize our workloads and grow them as
required.  Tools like vCenter Operations help automate this process by monitoring the
environment and providing sizing recommendations in easy to consume reports.  This
ensures you can get maximum value from your hardware investment and provide excellent
services levels to your customers.