Avoiding the Virtual CPU Dilemma – Overprovisioning vCPU to pCPU ratios
2011 was a year where despite the economic constraints everything Big was seemingly good; Big Data, Big Clouds, Big VMs etc.
Caught in the industry’s lust for this excess, 2011 was also the year I lost count of how many overprovisioned resources to ‘Big’ Production VMs I witnessed. More often than not this was a typical reaction from System Admins trying to alleviate their fears of potential performance problems to important VMs.
It was the year where I began to hear justifications such as “yes we are overprovisioning our production VMs..but apart from the cost savings, overallocating our available underlying resources to a VM isn’t a bad thing, in fact it allows it to be scalable”.
Despite this 2011 was also the year where I lost count of the amount of times I had to point out that sometimes overprovisioning a VM does lead to performance problems – specifically when dealing with Virtual CPUs.