A couple of weeks ago I asked this question on twitter about what the average disk size of a virtual machine is these days. Within a couple of minutes Ben Thomas replied and said we might be able to create a survey script and he copied William Lam in. Now for those who never worked with William, if you ask him a question like that you can expect him to knock something out… William and Ben decided not to just knock out a survey script, but rather an open community project called vOpenData.
This open community project consists of a script that collects the data (and they collect a significant amount, you can see what they collect here.) and is aiming to provide various trending statistics and data for virtualized environments. The data is fed back in to the vOpenData database. The vOpenData website has a great dashboard which provides you all these cool stats. For instance, at the moment there are 77 infrastructures that provided data to their collection. The question I asked, what is the average disk size, currently says “61.51GB”. That average is based on those 77 infrastructures with over 27.000 VMs in total combined. Nice right!?!
I have already emailed William a bunch of suggestions, and as I will be in Palo Alto this week I am sure some more will bubble up during conversations. I am hoping that everyone sees the power of a solution like this and can help feeding data in to the vOpenData platform.
Go here to download the bits and feed up!
** I have had some people asking me how vOpenData compares to CloudPhysics. I have also seen some people comparing vOpenData to CloudPhysics… To be honest you can’t really compare them. Where vOpenData is about averages and statistics, CloudPhysics is more about analytics and simulation models. **
Marco Broeken says
I’ve asked the same question about @CloudPhysics, I was thinking about if they would be able to share this same statistical data? Anonymously of course, if their customers would approve.
Duncan Epping says
They could indeed provide the same type of data…
Ben Thomas says
Oh, we intend to, stand by 🙂
karlochacon says
Missing average LUN/Datastore size
karlochacon says
By the way amnazing information
Fred Peterson says
How skewed is that figure though? Say you had 300 VMs, 283 of them 35GB. It would take just 17 at 500GB to skew the average up to 61GB.
Level380 says
Ummm yeah, but thats why its called a average! Some VM’s are small, some are large. When you’re planning out how much space is required, you need to work on a ‘average’ figure. So in this case working on say 300 VM’s @ 60GB each would have been around right for your environment. As you say, 283 of them are only 35GB and 15 of them are 500GB.
Joe G says
This looks like a very interesting idea. Playing with the code here now too!
Level380 says
Seems like the average VM is now upto nearly 70GB!
karlochacon says
Layout was changed cool!!! now top Storage Vendors is included….once a friend told me that EMC was expensive… now It might be expensive but is the top at least in Virtual environments