Introduction:
Sizing a VMware vRealize Log Insight infrastructure involves determining the appropriate resources needed to handle the expected log data volume while ensuring optimal performance and scalability. Let’s Understand how you can efficiently set up Log Insight in your Infrastructure with the Right Storage Sizing.
This article will be able to guide you with the Exact Details that you would need to have the Exact Storage Calculations for your IT Infrastructure.
Log Insight is an intelligent Appliance by Vmware that is used to provide a Log Retention Capacity to your IT Infrastructure. The reason behind using this tool is that some Industries have a very specific requirement of keeping the Logs for their Infra for a very specific period, for some it can be 30 days, and for some, it can go to 365 Days. Now Keeping these logs on the Devices for 365 Days is not possible as it will require a lot of Storage and it might bring the performance down for some applications.
With Log Insight you can capture this data and save it for the User at a Common Place and once needed can easily be queried and extracted.
Sizing Understanding:
When we talk about sizing, the first thing that comes to mind is where we want to capture the logs and how many devices will be sending their logs to the Log Insight Appliance.
So Let’s first understand what different components we want to integrate with our Log Insight.
For Reference let’s take the below Example:
vCenter Server 4
ESXi Host: 64
Windows Server: 20
Linux Servers: 50
Total Sources = 138
As per the Article: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Validated-Design/4.1/com.vmware.vvd.mseg-design.doc/GUID-7E2833A8-047C-4C36-A877-CB0982AB5266.html
Generally,
- The Rate of Logs Per Day for a Linux Machine is 150 MB which is 170 Bytes per message and
- For Windows, this is 190 MB with 220 Bytes per message.
So for Reference, we can take 220 as our reference point.
- Now Let’s find the Disk Usage Per Day:
Total Source x 190 MB of logs per day per source * 1e-9 GB per byte ≈ disk space per-day
138 x 190 x 1e-9 GB per byte = 26 GB- Now once we have this information Let’s find out the Retention period we want for our Infrastructure. Let’s take 30 Days for Reference.
Disk Space Per Day x 30 = Total Space Required.
26 x 30 = 780 GB- Now the Last consideration is Log Insight Clustering. In case you want to use a 3 Node Log Insight you can finally reach the right size by Dividing the value by 3.
- Total Space Required / No of Log Insight Appliance = Total Space Required on Each Appliance.
780 / 3 = 260 GBSo now you know that adding 260 GB to each of your Log Insight is going to meet the requirements of Keeping logs for 138 Objects for 30 Days.
