VMware Aria Operations 8.18 Sizing Guidelines

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information on using the sizing guidelines for VMware Aria Operations 8.18, to determine the configurations used during installation, or post install.

Notes: 

• An object in this table represents a basic entity in Aria Operations that is characterized by properties and metrics that are collected from adapter data sources. Example of objects include a virtual machine, a host, a datastore for a VMware vCenter adapter, a storage switch port for a storage devices adapter, an Exchange server, a Microsoft SQL Server, a Hyper-V server, or Hyper-V virtual machine for a Hyperic adapter, and an AWS instance for a AWS adapter.
• For VMware Aria Operations (SaaS) (formerly known as vRealize Operations Cloud) sizing, see VMware Aria Operations (SaaS) Sizing Guidelines.
• For other versions of VMware Aria Operations, see VMware Aria Operations Sizing Guidelines.

Recommended sizing can be checked by inputting values on vropssizer.vmware.com, or by inputting values on the attached spreadsheet.

Environment

VMware Aria Operations 8.18

Resolution

By default, VMware offers Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large configurations during installation. You can size the environment according to the existing infrastructure to be monitored. After the VMware Aria Operations instance outgrows the existing size, you must expand the cluster to add nodes of the same size.

	VMware Aria Operations Node					Cloud Proxy (CP)
	Extra Small	Small	Medium	Large	Extra Large	Small	Standard
Objects and Metrics
Single-Node Maximum Objects	700	10,000	30,000	44,000	100,000	8,000 (4)	40,000 (4)
Single-Node Maximum Collected Metrics (1)	140,000	1,600,000	5,000,000	8,000,000	20,000,000	1,200,000	6,000,000
Maximum number of nodes in a cluster	1	2	8	16	12	200
Multi-Node Maximum Objects Per Node	N/A	6,000	17,000	36,000	88,000	N/A
Multi-Node Maximum Metrics Per Node		1,400,000	4,000,000	6,000,000	15,000,000
Maximum number of objects in a cluster	700	12,000	136,000	576,000	1,056,000
Maximum number of metrics in a cluster	140,000	2,800,000	32,000,000	81,600,000	126,000,000
Maximum number of objects in a extended cluster (2)	840	13,200	149,600	633,600	1,161,600
Maximum number of metrics in a extended cluster (2)	188,000	3,080,000	35,200,000	89,760,000	138,600,000
Configuration
vCPU	2	4	8	16	24	2	4
Default Memory (GB)	8	16	32	48	128	8	32
Maximum Memory (GB) (2)	16	32	64	96	256	N/A
vCPU: physical core ratio for data nodes (3)	1 vCPU to 1 physical core at scale maximums
Network latency (5)	< 5 ms					< 500 ms
Network latency for agents (to VMware Aria Operations node or CP) (5)	< 20 ms
Network bandwidth (Mbps) (6)	N/A					15	60
Datastore latency	< 10 ms, with possible occasional peaks up to 15 ms
IOPS	See the Sizing Guide Worksheet for details
Disk Space	See the Sizing Guide Worksheet for details
Other maximums
Maximum number of telegraf agents per node	N/A					500	3,000
Maximum number of vCenter on a single collector	5	25	50	100	120	25	100
Maximum number of the Service Discovery objects	N/A	3,000
Maximum number of concurrent users per node (7)	10					N/A
Maximum certified number of concurrent users (8)	300
Maximum number of concurrent API calls per client	50
Maximum number of concurrent API calls per node	300

1. This is the total number of metrics from all adapter instances. To get this number, go to the Administration page and open Audit page.
2. With maximum memory configuration (Extended Cluster) the maximum number for objects and metrics is 20% more for single-node and 10% more for multi-node.
3. It is critical to allocate enough CPU for environments running at scale maximums to avoid performance degradation. Refer to the VMware Aria Operations Cluster Node Best Practices .
4. Based on the VMware vCenter adapter.
5. The latency limits are provided between nodes, nodes and Cloud Proxies in Round Trip Time (RTT).
6. Network bandwidth requirement numbers are provided between nodes and Cloud Proxies working at their respective maximum sizings.
7. The maximum number of concurrent users is 10 per node with objects or metrics at maximum levels (For example, 16 nodes Large with 200K objects can support 160 concurrent users).
8. The maximum certified number of concurrent users is achieved on a system configured with the objects and metrics at 50% of supported maximums (For example, 4 nodes Large with 32K object).

Sizing guidelines for VMware Aria Operations Continuous Availability

Continuous Availability (CA) allows the cluster nodes to be stretched across two fault domains, with the ability to experience up to one fault domain failure and to recover without causing cluster downtime. CA requires an equal number of nodes in each fault domain and a witness node, in a third site, to monitor split brain scenarios.

	VMware Aria Operations Node
	Small	Medium	Large	Extra Large
Maximum number of nodes in each Continuous Availability fault-domain (*)	1	4	8	6

* Each Continuous Availability cluster must have one Witness node which will require 2 vCPUs and 8GB of Memory.

	Between fault-domains	Between witness node and fault-domains
Latency	< 10ms, with peaks up to 20ms during 20sec intervals	< 30ms, with peaks up to 60ms during 20sec intervals
Packet Loss	Peaks up to 2% during 20sec intervals	Peaks up to 2% during 20sec intervals
Bandwidth	10Gbits/sec	10Mbits/sec

VDI use case

• A large node can collect up to 20,000 VMware Aria Operations for Horizon objects when a dedicated Cloud Proxy is used.
• A large node can collect up to 20,000 VMware Aria Operations for Published Apps objects when a dedicated Cloud Proxy is used.

Constraints

• If you have >1 node, then all nodes must be scaled equally. No mixing of nodes with different sizes.
• Snapshots impact performance. Snapshots on the disk causes slow IO performance and high CPU co-stop values which degrades the performance of VMware Aria Operations.
• In HA, each object is replicated in some nodes of a cluster, hence the limit for HA based instance is two times less compare to non HA.
• VMware Aria Operations HA supports only one node failure. Avoid single-point-of-failure by putting each nodes into different hosts in the vSphere cluster.
• In CA, each object is replicated in paired nodes of a cluster, hence the limit for a CA based instance is two times less compared to non CA.
• VMware Aria Operations CA supports up to one fault domain failure. Avoid single-point-of failure by placing fault domains across a stretched vSphere cluster.

Scaling Tips

• Scale up vertically (adding more vCPU/Memory), not horizontally (adding more nodes).

Use the configuration which has the least number of nodes.
Example: For 352,000 objects, deploy as 4 Extra Large nodes instead of 10 Large nodes. You will save almost half the CPU.

• You can increase RAM size instead of increasing both RAM and CPU.

This is useful if the number of objects is close to the upper limit. Check that there is enough RAM on the underlying hardware.
Example: Large node has 48GB and the number of objects are closed to 44,000. You can increase up to 96 GB. This assumes the underlying ESXi has >96 GB per socket.

• Scale down CPU configuration.

The cluster will perform better if the nodes stay within a single socket (don't cross NUMA boundaries).
Example: Reclaim up to 4 vCPUs from the Large and Extra Large node VMs if the cluster is not running at the upper limits, and the CPU usage in node VMs is less than 60%.

Collectors

The collection process on a node will support adapter instances where the total number of objects is not more than 700, 10,000, 30,000 44,000 and 100,000 on extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large multi-node VMware Aria Operations clusters respectively. For example, a 2-node system of small nodes will support a total of 20,000 objects. However, if an adapter instance needs to collect 15,000 objects, a collector that runs on a small node cannot support that as a small node can only handle 10,00 objects. In this situation, you can add a large cloud proxy and pin the adapter instance to the cloud proxy or scale up by using a configuration that supports more objects.

Cloud Proxy

• Collect from larger vCenter Servers with up to 65000 objects by a scaling up a large Cloud Proxy to 8 vCPU and 32GB of RAM.
• CPU and Memory configurations can both be doubled to achieve higher collecting objects and metrics.
  • A vCenter may exceed the supported objects/metrics which are supported by Cloud Proxies, thus the CPU/Memory configuration can be doubled to cover the demand.
  • Example: If a vCenter Server has 12,000 objects then a Small configuration Cloud Proxy can have it’s CPU and Memory doubled to 4 vCPUs and 16 GB RAM to support those objects.
• The number objects and metrics collected by the VMware Aria Application Monitoring (telegraf) agents should be within the supported maximum limits.
  • Each telegraf agent may collect many objects and metrics directly depending on the services running on the Operating System.
  • Example: 100 Linux Virtual Machines which have Apache Tomcat configured on them will each bring 10 additional objects adding 1000 objects to the overall count alongside the vCenter objects.