We are campaigning for more resources in our vSphere vCenter (VMWare 5.5). Sadly, I don't have the level of access to it that allows me to see things like page size and so far in my reading i can't find anything beyond statements that this or that config 'affects" my allocations. And since there are no recommendations for overcommitment even though there are notes that certain configs can affect my ability to support it it's pretty hard to get traction when we say "yo, we need more RAM/CPUs"
(my reference: VMware vSphere 5.1 I read through the entire section on Memory Virt. basics and Administering Resources however most of the settings described were specifically denied in the vSphere Client)
I believe i have 144G of Memory and 72 vCPUs (2x6 actual) yet i'm chugging along with some serious overcommitments: the vms are a little cranky at the moment about their RAM and i'm overcommitted by 210% I am getting memory warnings at the moment, but they tend to resolve by bringing down a vm with as little as 1G RAM. In my experience, however, even a warning can cause failures of the underlying vms.
I'm not currently overcommitted for CPUs, but upon quick review of the cpu section i don't see anything about overcommitment. HAs anybody written an article on such a thing. I couldn't face reading any more sections, but will perhaps tackle that tomorrow.
I was sad to find that unlike with disk space which i tackled several years ago, there were no suggestions or recommendations. So, my question is. For the most common configurations of VMWare, what is the recommended maximum overcommitment of CPU and Memory. I don't mind reading blogs, but i need to be able to filter it down to: config a: 110% 100%, config b:90% 90%.