Capacity Planning

A discrepancy between physical server and storage capacity and the demands of virtual machines results in under-utilized resources and/or poor service levels. Furthermore, the inability to accurately plan future capacity can result in longer than anticipated lead times for virtual machines to fulfill new business requirements. The goal of capacity planning is to minimize these discrepancies and ensure that future capital expenditure if managed efficiently.

Virtualization is a on-going project for most organizations. Some of these projects are in their early stages. Others are well along toward achieving the levels of virtualization that the organization desires. Tools are required to assist in growth planning and change management within a virtualization capability.

Questions about necessary capital equipment investments need to be explored in terms of the behavior of VMs from the existing environment. The load profiles and capacity profiles of virtualization components, taking all resource needs and resource contentions into account, should be used to produce accurate models to guide the processes of infrastructure build-out and optimization.

VMTurbo helps capacity planning teams:

• Minimizes the effort required to produce capacity plans to support existing & future needs
• Provide the business with more accurate investment plans
• Ensure that enough capacity is provisioned to meet  business demands on time

Performance

Job one of any corporate IT environment is to deliver application performance – meeting the required quality-of-service goals for all application classes.  To meet this goal, it’s critical to know – as close to real time as possible – whether there are performance problems, infrastructure bottlenecks, what actions need to be taken to resolve problems, and even more importantly – prevent them in the first place.

Bottlenecks and other challenges can pop up throughout the entire IT stack, so your virtualization management approach needs to be as broad:

• Looking at the virtual machines, physical machines, network and storage infrastructure;
• Monitoring a sufficiently broad number of parameters, including CPU and Memory congestion, co-scheduling congestion, IO and network bottlenecks, over- and under-utilization, etc;

VMTurbo’s Virtualization Management Suite not only resolves problems, but also works to proactively keep the data center in a healthy state.  It is a proactive system that keeps the managed environment healthy by continuously adjusting and tuning the managed entities, keeping the performance of all the entities at a similar levels. 

Unlike a threshold-based system that reacts to abnormalities when performance violates thresholds, VMTurbo maintains your data center in a much more stable and predictable state.

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Infrastructure Efficiency

Naturally, if application performance was the sole requirement, we could simply over-provision, which would return us to the low utilization metrics associated with a non-virtualized environment.  Today many organizations that have deployed virtual infrastructure are challenged with what specific action plans they should take to optimize the efficiency of their environment without compromising the service levels of virtual machines and the applications they support.

VMTurbo delivers an Intelligent Workload Management solution for Cloud & Virtualized environments, using our Economic Scheduling engine to dynamically adjust resource allocation to meet business goals.  Our customers ensure that applications get the resources they need to operate reliably, while utilizing infrastructure & human resources in the most efficient way.

Typical efficiency-related challenges are found in the illustration on the right.

VMTurbo:

1. Identifies under- and over-utilized  physical server and storage capacity, and provides corrective actions
2. Considers a broad set of metrics & constraints in decision making
3. Optimizes placement of workloads to maximize utilization of all resources while guaranteeing QoS
4. Provides a unified management solution to support multiple virtual & cloud environments from a single appliance, from a single pane of glass
5. Supports custom policies reflecting the business and technical needs for automation, security, compliance, change control

VMTurbo monitors and analyzes VM workloads, resource capacity, constraints and QoS, as they evolve, and automatically computes optimal placement and settings of QoS tuning parameters.  The ultimate goal of these computations is to tune the performance of the VMs to maximize resource utilization while guaranteeing applications QoS.    The tuning actions proactively prevent performance problems  rather than waiting for problems to arise and reacting to them.

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