12.5. Monitoring CPU Usage

When monitoring a virtual machine, it's always a good starting point to keep an eye on CPU consumption. Many virtual machines started out in life as underperforming physical servers. One of VMware's most successful sales pitches is being able to take all those lackluster physical boxes that are not busy and convert them to virtual machines. Once converted, virtual infrastructure managers tend to think of these virtual machines as simple, lackluster, and low-utilization servers with nothing to worry over or monitor. The truth, though, is quite the opposite.

When the server was physical, it had an entire box to itself. Now it must share its resources with many other workloads. In aggregate, they represent quite a load, ...

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