Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5

Chapter 11

Managing Resource Allocation

The idea that we can take a single physical server and host many VMs has a great deal of value in today's dynamic datacenter environments, but let's face it: There are limits to how many VMs can run on a VMware ESXi host. To make the most of your virtualization platform, you must understand how key resources—memory, processors, disks, and networks—are consumed by the VMs running on the host and how the host itself consumes resources. The method an ESXi host uses to arbitrate access to each of these resources is a bit different. This chapter discusses how an ESXi host allocates these resources and how you ...