XenCenter

Workload Balancing Overview

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 is an appliance that balances your pool by relocating virtual machines onto the best possible servers for their workload in a resource pool. For example, Workload Balancing can:

  • Balance virtual-machine workloads across hosts in a resource pool
  • Determine the best host on which to start a virtual machine
  • Determine the best host on which to power on a virtual machine that you powered off
  • Determine the best host for each of the host’s virtual machines when you put that host into Maintenance mode

Note:

Workload Balancing is available for XenServer Premium Edition customers. For more information about licensing, see About XenServer Licensing.

Depending on your preference, Workload Balancing can accomplish these tasks automatically or prompt you to accept its optimization, consolidation, and placement recommendations. You can also configure Workload Balancing to power off hosts automatically during periods of low usage (for example, to save power at night).

Workload Balancing can send notifications in XenCenter regarding the actions it takes. For more information on how to configure the alert level for Workload Balancing alerts by using the XenAPI, see Configuring Workload Balancing alerts in XenCenter.

Workload Balancing evaluates the utilization of VM workloads across a pool. When a host reaches one of its thresholds, WLB relocates the VM to a different host in the pool.

To ensure the rebalancing and placement recommendations align with your environment’s needs, you can configure WLB to optimize workloads for resource performance or to maximize the density. These optimization modes can be configured to change automatically at predefined times or stay the same always. For more granularity, you can fine-tune the weighting of individual resource metrics (CPU, network, memory, and disk).

To help you perform capacity planning, Workload Balancing provides historical reports about host and pool health, optimization and VM performance, and VM motion history.

For more information about Workload Balancing, you can see the XenServer product documentation.

Workload Balancing Overview

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