A day in the life of a VMware Admin

To understand what performance actually is, it is always good to begin with the customer. As shared in the previous chapter, the SDDC is providing a service, not a system. We have seen this in almost all customers. Whether the application team or VM owner pays for the service or not, it is a service. The existence of a chargeback model is practically optional. VM owners no longer own, hence care, about the underlying infrastructure.

Here is a common story often told in the virtualization community, which will resonate with you as an IaaS provider:

A VM owner complains to you that her VM is slow. It was not slow yesterday. Her application architect and lead developer have verified that:

• The VM CPU and RAM utilization did not increase. They are also within a healthy range. The application team has verified that the CPU run queue is also in the healthy range.
• The disk latency is good. It is below 10 milliseconds.
• The network isn't dropping any packets.
• There...