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.
In the virtualized infrastructure this can be very challenging due to the ease with which new virtual machines can be provisioned and the dynamically changing characteristics of workloads which share common server and storage resources. Capacity planning is further complicated by the desire of application owners to adopt best practices advocated by software vendors, which were established for deployment of their applications in physical environments. This can often result in oversizing of virtual machine resources and waste resources.
The Virtualization Planning Toolbox
With VMTurbo, you get both the information you need to make good decisions, and powerful tools that allow you to perform the analysis needed to turn that information into concrete plans that support the business.
The VMTurbo Planner provides architects and planners with the ability to run “What If Scenarios” so that they can reliably predict how future workload demand can be met, satisfying service levels, without having to over provision server and storage resources. This leads to lower ongoing capital and operational expenditure whilst ensuring that the needs for new virtual machines can be satisfied within reasonable lead times.
The Planner’s VM Rightsizing capabilities also enables unused resources to be reclaimed by identifying dormant VM’s which can be decommissioned and by recommending specific actions to reduce the resources allocated to over provisioned VM’s.
The VMTurbo Reporter provides a library of standard reports as well as custom reports which simplify the process of analyzing historical data to pinpoint under and over utilized capacity. Based on this, capacity planners can then use the VMTurbo Planner to run focused “What if” analysis scenarios to determine potential solutions to make more efficient use of the infrastructure whilst preserving service levels.
The
Reporter also enables capacity planners to identify areas of the infrastructure where resources are being wasted and can be reclaimed. This may be caused by dormant virtual machines, over provisioned physical and virtual servers and files which are being unnecessarily retained on storage.
Assuring Performance
Optimizing Capacity
Communicating With Stakeholders