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 virtual guests hosted on it. Using the information reported by this test, administrators can:

  • Determine which of the guests is 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 guests is receiving a very high rate of requests compared to the others, this guest may be a candidate for migration to another Xen server, so as to minimize the impact it has on the other guests on the current server.
  • Determine times when sudden or steady spikes in the physical resource utilization are caused by the guest machines

Figure 1 : The tests mapped to the Outside View of VMs layer