In order to enable easy managment of nodes inside your cluster, the panel ships with a visual tool to set limits on each node. These limits are what decides which nodes are being used for VM creation. You need to set these limits in order to start ordering VMs.

Open the Settings > Host Page and you will be greeted with this page if you have a cluster setup. If not, you will be redirected to the page to directly view your node. i think the data here is self-explaining except for the Limit.

Node Limits explanation 🔗

In order to not overload your nodes the Panel implements a system where you can set a limit per Node of how much percentage of the resources you want to use for VMs. Currently, this includes storage + memory, cpu cores are left out of the equation. So in order to determine the current load of the node, the Panel sums the storage + memory used by all non-templated VMs currently on the node, ignoring wether they are online or offline. This result then gets calculated against the resources of the node in order to get a percentage value, which represents how much of the server is used (in theory) by all VMs. Put simply, if the configured limit (by you) is less than the calculated percentage, the node will not be eligable for new VMs.

Single Node managment 🔗

When you open a single node, you get this page:

At first we have 2 bars that show the current CPU and memory usage. These are the live values.

Below that we have the configuration of the node limit. The “Provisioned Usage” is the actual usage calculated against the currently configured limit. If one of these values is greater than 100 percent the node is considered full and will not be picked for new VMs. On the right you have a slider and an input field where you can change the limit. The values on the left update accordinly so you have a reference on what impact your changes have.

At the bottom you have four graphs showing the current and historical CPU usage, memory consumption, network usage and storage usage of the root-disk.

Changing Limits 🔗

As you have observed in the image above, the node was over-provisioned and would not have been eligable for new VM creation. I want to create a new VM on that node so I can just change the limit until the bars on the left change to be blue. After that, save the settings and the node is eligable for new VMs again:

Reasons why you might want to set the limit above 100%:

• You have a big fileserver with thin provisioning taking up much of your Storage
• You have test VMs that have a large chunk of memory but never run