Capacity Management in a Virtualized Private Cloud

Capacity Management importance has been on the rise since Virtualization started becoming a main stream. In earlier days in the physical world, Capacity Planning/Management used to end at the time the hardware was purchased. In most cases, the hardware was over-sized to ensure it can handle the workload as well future growth of the application. Though as that over-sized box is dedicated to a single application, it did not matter how you sized that application as long the server has enough resources to run it. Though when virtualizing the story is fundamentally different, as now you have multiple VMs per server. If VMs are over-sized that means your consolidation ratio & other VMs performance can be affected. If Virtual machines are under-sized, then they will not perform well. Idle & unused VMs can be of a huge waste of expensive storage and need to be avoided.

Capacity Management importance has even grown further, when VMware has announced its new vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing module as if you madly over-provision your VMs that will guarantee your cost will not only jump on hardware, but on vSphere licensing as well. I believe after the announcement of vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing the demand for Capacity Management products like VMware vCenter CapacityIQ & vKernel vOPS Capacity Manager. In this  article, I will cover a bit about each of these to Capacity Management products vCenter CapacityIQ from VMware & vKernel vOPS Capacity Manager as they have been the top two Capacity Management Products for a Virtualized Environment.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ

If VMware ESX/ESXi is your hypervisor, then VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is for you. VMware vCenter CapacityIQ provide the following Capacity Management capabilities:

• Allow you to model current Capacity Utilization, & when will you run out of resource.
• Help you optimally size your VMs. Detect Over sized, under-sized, powered off, & Idle VMs.
• What if modeling Capacity Scenarios
• Its an easy to install & configure appliance in no time.
• Its a part of vCenter Operations Advanced & vCenter Operations Enterprise

Videos are always a great tool to show a product features as well how to install it. Watch the below two videos to find out more about VMware vCenter CapacityIQ features & how to install it.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Features & Interface Video:

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Installation Video:

vKernel vOPS Capacity Manager

vKernel vOPS Capacity Manager is a third party Capacity Management that has been doing well, specially if you are running an environment where a diverse of hypervizors exist.

• Capacity Availability Map models available VM slots based on existing VM’s resource allocations, average or maximum VM size, or custom VM load signatures for CPU, memory, storage and disk throughput in the current or future state of the environment. Multiple VMs can be modeled within specific hosts, clusters, resource pools, and datastores.
• Capacity for reserved VM slots can be denoted in order to remove this capacity from further modeling consideration. Alerts and reconciliation abilities help virtualization administrators maintain the accuracy of actual capacity available for modeling.
• The Future Bottlenecks Report forecasts upcoming VM performance issues, time frame to issue, and constraining resource.
• Predictive Alerts warn when certain utilization conditions are forecast to occur.

Watch the below video to have a quick look at vKernel vOPS Capacity Manager:

This post was a part of my discovery to VMware Enterprise Management products where I have put a page to include links to all of these at: VMware Enterprise Management Page