System administrators too often forget that EDI processing spikes. While the demand on an EDI system may typically be low, traffic spikes can cause resource utilization to increase to many times the baseline. Often, the consequence of everyday low demand is that VM managers set the capacity too low, causing failure when a traffic spike occurs. This is can be very difficult to detect and diagnose, particularly in smaller shops that do not manage their VM resources due to lack of time or expertise.
Another point to consider is that all of the VMs on a given physical host share the same resources. While the VM that runs the EDI system may seem like it has low resource utilization, other VMs on the same host may be using up more than their fair share of resources. The result is poor performance or unpredictable issues with the EDI system. DCS has seen this often, particularly with disk I/O, since many VM tools don’t set a maximum allocation of disk I/O per machine like they do for CPU and memory utilization.
This is among the first things Data Communication Solutions (DCS) checks when a customer calls us with a “strange things are happening” scenario on their EDI system. DCS will review logs on the EDI system to identify peak resource usage, and also work with the system administrator to ensure that the VM host has adequate resources for all of the VMs that it’s hosting.
VM Managers: Have you encountered this problem? What was the symptom? What ways do you use to enforce the system recommendations? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.
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