In my last post, I covered the four stages of capacity management, and talked about some of the reasons why managing your virtual capacity is equally as important as physical capacity management. Now it’s time to talk specifically about how we can help.
It’s worth repeating that capacity lifecycle management isn’t just about forecasting growth, it’s about overall environment health, optimization, and planning and managing changes. There are a few common challenges that any virtual administrator faces on a regular basis - do any of these sound familiar?
Performance issues – Sub-optimal resource allocation can result in slow/poor performance – and unhappy users.
Workload allocation/balance – If you have to add 50 new VMs, where should they go? Or if you add two more clusters, how many more VMs should you create?
Throwing money away – Do you have to “guesstimate” memory, CPU, and storage capacity needs? Most people do – and overspend to avoid risking poor performance or having to buy unplanned expensive hardware off-cycle.
Foglight Capacity Director can help you tackle and conquer these issues.
First off, you’ll be able to see how much availability and time left you have for CPU, memory, storage, and IOPs, to prevent performance issues. You’ll also gain the ability to quickly identify existing bottlenecks and take action to fix them.
Change planning and management: use the scenario modeler to see the impacts of change before taking action, whether that action is deploying VMs or moving VMs between clusters.
Once you’ve been running Capacity Director for a while (or if you’re already using Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition) you’ll have access to historical data to better forecast resource requirements, and predict not only when you’ll need to buy new servers, but what capacity those servers will need to have.
Foglight Capacity Director is available for use with Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.5 or with Foglight Management Server and select components.
