The Outside View of VMs Layer

The Outside View of VMs layer provides the host operating system’s view of the resource usage levels of each of the desktops hosted on it. Using the information reported by this test, administrators can:

• Determine which of the desktops are taking up more resources (CPU, memory, network, or disk) than the others. This information can help with load balancing or capacity planning. For example, if one of the desktops is receiving a very high rate of requests compared to the others, this desktop may be a candidate for migration to another hypervisor, so as to minimize the impact it has on the other desktops on the current  server.
• Determine times when sudden or steady spikes in the physical resource utilization are caused by the desktops
• Know which guest systems at what times experienced heavy session loads or unexpected session logouts

Figure 1 : The tests mapped to the Xen VMs layer

The sections that follow will discuss the Xen VM Status test, Xen VM Details test, and the Xen User Logins test only.