How to undertake capacity planning for VMware vSphere
By Mike Laverick
In this article, I want to discuss the tools that are available for undertaking capacity planning exercises prior to virtualising your estate. I want to outline some of the key performance indicators you should be looking at in the physical world if you don’t have access to commercial tools.
During the article, I will discuss some of the business and philosophical challenges facing the process of capacity planning. Although my focus will be on the dominant market player — VMware — many of the issues I discuss will affect any virtualisation project.
For me there are four main tools you could use against an existing physical environment:
- VMware Guide Consolidation
- VMware Capacity Planner
- Platespin Recon
- Guest Operating System Tools
Before I begin, I want to outline what I think a capacity planning exercise should achieve and what tools should be available to achieve those goals. In my experience, when customers undertake a capacity planning exercise, they are looking to identify and isolate two main issues:
- What specification of hardware will be needed to consolidate the existing environment?
- Are there any candidates that should not be virtualised because they won’t perform well or because they are simply not in use?
What drives both goals is money. By knowing the right specification of hardware, you can stop the business from buying too much or too little. Without some capacity planning exercise in place, most people massively underestimate the amount of kit they have in the data centre, whilst at the same time they massively overestimate how much hardware they will actually need
Read On…
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