The Outside View of VMs Layer

The Outside View of VMs layer provides the host operating system’s view of the resource usage levels of each of the virtual guests hosted on it. Using the information reported by this test, administrators can:

  • Determine which of the guests is taking up more resources (CPU, memory, network, or disk) than the others. This information can help with load balancing or capacity planning. For example, if one of the guests is receiving a very high rate of requests compared to the others, this guest may be a candidate for migration to another ESX server, so as to minimize the impact it has on the other guests on the current server.

  • Determine times when sudden or steady spikes in the physical resource utilization are caused by the guest machines

  • Know which guest systems at what times experienced heavy session loads or unexpected session logouts

hypervguestslayertests1

Figure 1 : The tests associated with the Outside View of VMs layer

The VM Connectivity test, and the Virtual Machine Management Service Summary test have already been discussed in Chapter 2 of this document. Since the Hyper-V Guests test and Guests Status Information test reports additional measures for the Hyper-V VDI model, and because the Hyper-V Logins test applies only to this model, the sections to come discuss these 3 tests alone in detail.