IBM Turbonomic Glossary

Ballooning is a technique for VMware ESXi hypervisors to reclaim memory from virtual machines that they host. For VMware environments, Turbonomic discovers utilization of ballooning and considers ballooning in its analysis.

On the host, a balloon driver runs in the VM guest OS. When the host needs more memory, it can “inflate” the balloon on the VM to claim physical pages on the guest OS. The VM cannot use that memory, which leaves it available for the host to allocate to other consumers. The host drives ballooning when it is low on memory. If the host is in a healthy state, you should not see ballooning on the hosted VMs.

Bring Your Own License (BYOL) is a licensing model that lets corporate customers use their existing licenses flexibly, on-premise or in the cloud, without additional fees. Under this model, the customer remains responsible for managing these licenses, including renewals. For migrations from on-prem to the cloud, you can set BYOL in the plan configuration.

If you enable BYOL, Turbonomic assumes that you are paying for the OS license, and will not include the license cost in the plan results. If you do not enable BYOL, Turbonomic gets the license cost from the service provider (when it can) and includes that cost in the plan results.

For network environments that support buffered switch ports (Arista networks), this resource measures utilization of a port buffer. For example, if a host connects to the network through port 1 on a switch, and that port has enough traffic to cause packet buffering, this resource will show utilization.

A Business Application is a logical grouping of application entities and nodes that work together to compose a complete application as end users would view it.

Turbonomic users can monitor overall performance, make resourcing decisions, and set policies in the context of their Business Applications.

A Business Transaction is a logical grouping of underlying elements in the Supply Chain of the Application View in Turbonomic. These elements, which should represent all elements that fulfill a user-initiated request, could include Services, Applications Components, Database Servers, Containers, and Virtual Machines. A Business Transaction can also be used to represent a part of a Business Application and how that application is structured in your environment. 

The performance of a Business Transaction has a direct impact on user experience. You can use Business Transactions to monitor performance as experienced by your end users.

[Also known as Consumer] A Buyer is an entity in your environment that consumes resources from another entity, such as a Virtual Machine buying memory resources from a Host.