“What-if” analysis for planning workload and hardware changes
(Top 10 Reasons to Choose VMTurbo)
Common questions faced by capacity planners and system administrators include:
- Can the current infrastructure accommodate new VMs?
- How should new VMs be provisioned among current hosts?
- Will the added workload cause hosts or storage bottlenecks? If so, what new host and storage resources are required?
Integrated in VMTurbo's virtualization management suite, the Planner is a wizard-based tool that will help you plan workload changes and hardware transformation, provisioning and/or decommissioning. The Planner features:
- Flexible specification of physical host and storage hardware models to drive transformation planning;
- Elimination of over-provisioning while preserving service levels;
- Automatic creation of detailed action plans.
VMTurbo maximizes the ROI from your virtualized environment, assuring the quality of service delivered while right-sizing the environment. The suite's modules work in concert, addressing the past, present and future. Whereas the Monitor and Reporter provide real-time and historical insights, respectively, the Planner helps you prepare for change -- helping answer the key question, What do we do to ensure our environment stays healthy and continues to deliver the required service/performance most efficiently?
The Need to Plan
[Presentation: The Case for Planning in a Virtualized Data Center]
Traditionally, systematic infrastructure planning was primarily confined to large data centers, because large scale infrastructures and applications were simply too complex for ad-hoc processes. Small and medium IT organizations could use ad-hoc processes: each application was allocated its own independent silo of physical machines, and each silo could be managed/grown/changed through ad-hoc processes (hence, no need for planning). But virtualization redefines IT fundamentals. Decisions can no longer be partitioned across silo boundaries, and actions can result in waste and/or performance problems. Manual ad-hoc management processes are too limited:
- Changes may require (re-)assignment of workloads;
- Complexity and waste can grow dramatically when the number of VMs increases, when physical machines vary, when there are constraints (e.g., storage access, security policies), and when the rate of changes is high;
- Ad hoc processes can lead to costly inefficiencies;
- Planning must consider all workload types (not just CPU), and is a continuous adaptation (vs. being a one-time process).
As a result, automated planning tools can be invaluable for maximizing the ROI of your virtual infrastructure.
Let the planning wizard assist you
The planning wizard provides significant simplification and intuitive navigation through the complexity of planning parameters, options and constraints. The wizard enables you to select and control any planning parameter of interest. Start by selecting the baseline for planning between a snapshot of current state, or use historical data. Select flexibly among key elements of your infrastructures and workloads to change: # of VMs, CPU/Memory/Storage demand, utilization levels, # of servers, CPU/Memory/Storage capacity, different hardware models, etc.
Use editable libraries of hardware templates to define scenarios. Let the Wizard guide you through creating multiple planning scenarios, computing their impact and comparing among them. Delete scenarios of lesser interest and improve scenarios of interest. The Wizard provides you with flexible and simple to manage workflow to create, analyze, select and optimize your infrastructure plans. Finally, when done planning, the Wizard will create an orderly set of incremental actions to best implement the plan and assure that it meets your goals.
Plan For Workload Changes
Do you need to deploy a new VM? handle increasing demand for CPU/Memory/Storage by existing VMs? Shift a VM to a new cluster? The VMTurbo Planner will help you evaluate these and other changes in your workload. The Planner will accurately compute the impact of such changes and will recommend options for deploying the workloads to best use your resource capacity. If the workload changes will cause utilization to exceed your targets, the Planner will advise you on what additional hardware resources are needed to service the changes.
Plan Hardware Changes
Do you wish to provision a new server, or a storage system? Expand the resources of existing servers (e.g., memory)? Decommission older hardware? The VMTurbo Planner will help you evaluate the impact of these hardware changes and optimize the performance gains. The Planner will compute the resource capacity needed to service the workload demands. It will advise you on how to best deploy VMs to use this capacity. The Planner will assure that your target utilization levels are maintained through the changes. At the same time, it will help you ascertain that no capacity is wasted through over-provisioning. It allows you to customize the hardware profiles so you can accurately describe the newly added hardware.
Ensure your target utilization levels
Utilization targets are important in ascertaining that VMs get their desired SLA and assure their performance. They are also important in assuring that capacity is effectively utilized and not wasted. The VMTurbo Planner accurately computes the impact of changes – in workload demands and resources capacity – to assure that your target utilization levels are strictly maintained. The Planner also ascertains that existing standards and custom constraints are maintained through the changes. These protections can provide invaluable help in protecting the SLA and performance seen by your applications users through changes.
•Traditionally only large data centers needed planning
–Large scale infrastructures and apps are too complex
for ad-hoc processes
•Small/medium IT could use ad-hoc processes
–Each app was allocated its own independent silo
of physical machines
–Each silo could be managed/grown/changed through
ad-hoc processes
–No need for planning