Dynamic Capacity Management -
Maximizing Utilization Safely within
Virtualized Infrastructure

Data centers, particularly those with virtualized infrastructure, are dynamic. The fluidity virtualization brings to an environment presents new opportunities for optimizing efficiency by moving workloads to maximize utilization. New challenges also arise in managing capacity and risk in the face of constant change. To ensure virtual environments are efficient, manageable, and reliable, virtualized data centers must employ dynamic capacity management, which is a combination of load balancing, governance and capacity planning.

CiRBA’s dynamic capacity management enables organizations to maximize utilization without introducing unnecessary risk by optimizing placements according to resource, business, and technical constraints. Through customizable and pre-packaged analysis templates, CiRBA provides dynamically updated analytics to balance workloads, control motioning, and proactively manage capacity within virtualized environments according to risk, performance and financial goals.

LARGER VIEW

Placement Optimization

CiRBA’s advanced analysis of technical, business, and resource constraints enables organizations to truly optimize workload and VM placements. On an ongoing basis, the process of matching capacity supply and demand ensures that the right workloads are running on the right servers at the right times to maximize utilization and efficiency while respecting the critical constraints of the environment. CiRBA’s V2V rebalancing analysis constantly provides guidance with respect to the best VM placements to service workloads in an efficient and safe manner. CiRBA also enables organizations to effectively manage whitespace, or spare capacity, to ensure that unexpected or infrequent utilization fluctuations have a “cushion” of capacity to absorb them and SLA requirements are met.

Placement Governance

New technologies for motioning virtual machines are very powerful, but can also put organizations at risk if not controlled properly. VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) together with VMotion motions virtual servers based on utilization balancing criteria, without consideration for the technical and business constraints required to safely govern placements. It is critical that organizations establish rules to eliminate potential conflicts and ensure that security zones, business process constraints, compliance issues, disaster recovery and chargeback systems are respected and that the virtualized infrastructure remains optimized over time. CiRBA analyzes environments on a regular basis and automatically populates DRS rules enabling organizations to take advantage of dynamically balanced workloads without violating critical boundaries and randomizing the environment. Through its risk dashboards, CiRBA also tracks an environment for potential changes that may impact the continued safe operation of workloads and can be configured to send notification to required parties of potential problems before they occur.

VM Rebalancing optimizes placements based on current requirements, constraints in order to improve utilization LARGER VIEW

Placement Planning

Although the ability of virtual environments to react to changing conditions is powerful, operating a data center in a purely reactive mode by solely leveraging load-balancing to determine placements can be costly and inefficient. CiRBA’s Proactive Resource Placement capability advances workload planning and management by leveraging historical utilization patterns and personalities, business rules and configuration constraints to proactively place VM’s to best serve the coming utilization pattern. This unmatched proactive analysis combined with integrations to virtual infrastructure management software such as VMware Virtual Center offers organizations the safest, most accurate way to truly take advantage of resource pools.

Defining Appropriate Rules for VMware’s DRS Prevents Randomization of Virtualized Environments LARGER VIEW

Placing New Workloads to Avoid Resprawl & Excess Capacity

Even a virtualized data center is at high risk of having unnecessary excess hardware. CiRBA audits new applications in staging environments and finds the best place for those applications within existing infrastructure. As part of an overall application deployment process these steps ensure that new hardware is purchased only when all other options are exhausted.

Advanced workload analysis provides utilization trending so that workloads can be proactively placed to suit predicted changes LARGER VIEW

Hardware Refresh

Hardware refresh is a necessary and ongoing process within data centers. However, upgrades have a negative impact on utilization rates as new hardware typically offers increased capacity. CiRBA analyzes environments to reveal the impact of new hardware options on utilization rates, enabling organizations to examine various options for further consolidation and the composition of virtualized infrastructure to ensure efficiencies are maximized and risk is managed.