XenCenter

Accepting Optimization Recommendations

Note:

XenCenter YYYY.x.x is currently in preview and is not supported for production use. Note that any future references to production support apply only when XenCenter YYYY.x.x and XenServer 8 go from preview status to general availability.

You can use XenCenter YYYY.x.x to manage your XenServer 8 and Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1 non-production environments. However, to manage your Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1 production environment, use XenCenter 8.2.7. For more information, see the XenCenter 8.2.7 documentation.

You can install XenCenter 8.2.7 and XenCenter YYYY.x.x on the same system. Installing XenCenter YYYY.x.x does not overwrite your XenCenter 8.2.7 installation.

Workload Balancing provides recommendations about ways you can migrate virtual machines to optimize your environment. Optimization recommendations appear in the WLB tab in XenCenter.

Optimization Recommendations tab.

This illustration shows a screen capture of the Optimization Recommendations list, which appears on the WLB tab. The Reason column displays the purpose of the recommendation. The Operation column displays the behavior change suggested for that optimization recommendation. This screen capture shows an optimization recommendation for a virtual machine, HA-prot-VM-7, and a host, host17.domain4.bedford4.ctx4.

Basis for optimization recommendations

Optimization recommendations are based on the following factors:

  • Placement strategy you select (that is, the placement optimization mode), as described in Adjusting the Optimization Mode
  • Performance metrics for resources such as a physical host’s CPU, memory, network, and disk utilization
  • The role of the host in the resource pool. When making placement recommendations, Workload Balancing considers only the pool coordinator if no other host can accept the workload. (Likewise, when a pool is operating in Maximum Density mode, Workload Balancing considers the pool coordinator last when determining the order in which to fill hosts with VMs.)

The optimization recommendations display the following information:

  • The name of the VM that Workload Balancing recommends relocating
  • The host it currently resides on
  • The host Workload Balancing recommends as the machine’s new location
  • The reason Workload Balancing recommends moving the VM

    For example, “CPU” to improve the CPU utilization.

After you accept an optimization recommendation, XenServer relocates all virtual machines listed as recommended for optimization.

Tip:

You can find out the optimization mode for a resource pool by selecting the pool in XenCenter and checking the Configuration section of the WLB tab.

To accept an optimization recommendation

  1. Select the pool for which you want to display recommendations in the Resources pane and then select the WLB tab. If there are any recommended optimizations for any virtual machines on the selected resource pool, they display on the WLB tab.
  2. To accept the recommendations, select Apply Recommendations. XenServer begins moving all virtual machines listed in the Optimization Recommendations section to their recommended servers.

    After you select Apply Recommendations, you can select Notifications and then Events tab to display the progress of the virtual machine migration.

Understanding WLB recommendations under High Availability

If you have Workload Balancing and the XenServer High Availability feature enabled in the same pool, it is helpful to understand how the two features interact. Workload Balancing is designed not to interfere with High Availability. If there is a conflict between a Workload Balancing recommendation and a High Availability setting, the High Availability setting always takes precedence. In practice, this means:

  • Workload Balancing will not automatically power off any hosts beyond the number specified in the Failures allowed box in the Configure HA dialog.
    • However, Workload Balancing might still make recommendations to power off more hosts than the number of host failures to tolerate. (For example, Workload Balancing still makes a recommendation to power off two hosts when High Availability is only configured to tolerate one host failure.) However, when you attempt to apply the recommendation, XenCenter might display an error message stating that High Availability is no longer guaranteed.
    • When Workload Balancing is running in automated mode and has power management enabled, any recommendations that exceed the number of host failures to tolerate are ignored. In this situation, if you look in the Workload Balancing log, you see a message that says a power-management recommendation was not applied because High Availability is enabled.
Accepting Optimization Recommendations