Businesses try to get the most out of any capital expenditure to improve their bottom line. When it comes to virtualization, this means trying to get the highest possible return on their virtualization hardware investment. You can do this by increasing the number of virtual machines (VMs) hosted. The greater the number of VMs, the lower the per VM hardware cost. This is what VM density means. Sounds great, right? Not if you add too many VMs to a finite infrastructure with limited resources.
Excessively high VM density can result in problems with performance, stability, and workload availability. In this article, we’ll see the 5 key factors to consider when optimizing your VM density. After discussing P2V ratios, we’ll discuss more about hypervisor overheads. Then the overloading clusters and peak demand spikes. Let’s get started!