Capacity Management within Virtual and
Physical Infrastructure

The introduction of virtualized infrastructure into data centers is having a significant impact on how organizations are planning and managing capacity and related resources. In particular, when examining the impact on capacity planning, Gartner notes in a recent report:

Virtualization introduces new challenges in ensuring that existing workloads are served with sufficient capacity to meet the coming demand of the business. The traditional measurement / analysis / trending activities that were used to estimate when workloads will outgrow servers aren't sufficient to maintain efficiency and manage capacity effectively within virtualized infrastructure. Optimizing utilization within this type of "new school" data center requires capacity planning to be more focused on management in aggregate, where resource supply is pooled to leverage economies of scale. In these pools, it is the unused capacity, or whitespace that determines the environment’s ability to absorb short-term shocks and service long term growth.

Organizations that strive to optimize capacity utilization within physical and virtual infrastructure require a comprehensive view of the constraints within an environment that can only be achieved by bringing together business, configuration and utilization data.

Enabling Enterprise Level Capacity Planning with a Single, Open Database

CiRBA provides a centralized repository for tracking all of the critical utilization, configuration and business attribute data required to accurately and easily analyze for optimal capacity-related decisions and workload placements. CiRBA’s advanced repository design facility combines efficient centralized storage of capacity data with open data access capabilities to form the foundation of enterprise capacity management. Leveraging CiRBA’s advanced analysis engine, capacity management and virtual infrastructure administrators can analyze virtual and physical environments to determine the best placements for workloads, track capacity health and status, achieve visibility into the available capacity in an environment and optimally allocate that capacity based on trending and forecasts of the coming demand.

Right-Size Environments According to Trending and Forecasting

In virtualized environments where placements are less fluid, capacity management disciplines are applied to determine optimal allocations or sizing to serve the coming demand for resources based on historical and forecasted requirements. CiRBA's advanced workload analysis provides accurate workload modeling to project how much capacity is required and where it should be allocated to meet projected demand. CiRBA’s analysis also determines the optimal placements of workloads considering all the factors required to properly size environments in addition to business and configuration constraints, risk tolerance, SLA requirements and financial considerations.

Manage Capacity Supply through Optimal Placements, Allocations and Reallocations

CiRBA enables organizations to effectively manage capacity supply in order to confidently right-size environments, optimize capacity allocations, and avoid over-provisioning. By the tracking physical and virtual resources available and their configurations, utilization and relevant business attributes, CiRBA provides aggregate, group, and system specific views of capacity supply that can be used to:

• Determine appropriate allocations based on forecasted demand and requirements vs configurations and available supply
• Assess whitespace and manage allocations to ensure appropriate levels
• Optimize Hardware Refresh decisions
• Identify, profile and determine how best to repurpose idle servers
• Determine how to minimize power consumption

Track Capacity Health and Status to Minimize Risk

CiRBA’s centralized repository tracks physical and virtual environments to understand changes in resources and utilization. Capacity managers can assess capacity health through CiRBA’s Capacity Health Dashboard that reports the results of utilization and risk analyses. In addition, flexible email-based notifications alert teams to changes that pose a threat or risk, enabling timely responses to potential issues turn into system failures or outages.

Optimize Workload Placements as the Environment Changes

CiRBA enables organizations to maximize utilization without introducing unnecessary risk by determining optimal placements for workloads according to utilization, business, and technical constraints. CiRBA can provide dynamically updated analytics to balance workloads, control motioning, and proactively manage capacity by recommending placements within virtualized environments according to risk, performance and financial goals. For more information, see Proactive VM Rebalancing.

Place New Workloads to Avoid Re-Sprawl & Over-Provisioning

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.

Enable Collaboration on Capacity Decisions through Pending Optimization Reporting

Virtual machine management systems are often the domain of system administrators and fall short in providing the insight required by the broad spectrum of stakeholders involved in capacity decision making. In addition, changes to environments typically happen without the involvement of application owners, creating friction and causing key business constraints to be overlooked. CiRBA enables users to review specific action plans that result from what-if analysis thereby facilitating collaboration between groups by automatically communicating proposed and pending changes. This ensures that all stakeholders are aware of virtualization plans, hardware refresh schedules, and other pending optimizations that affect their application systems.