Dynamic Capacity Management

Capacity planning has changed. The traditional measurement / analysis / trending activities that were used to estimate when workloads will outgrow servers aren’t sufficient to manage capacity effectively within virtualized infrastructure.

Virtualization introduces flexible pools of available capacity. Optimizing utilization within this type of “new school” data center requires that capacity planning be more focused on management in aggregate, where resource supply and demand 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. And based on the personalities of the workloads, the architecture of the underlying servers, service level requirements, availability requirements, technical consideration, business considerations and a raft of other factors, this is no simple task. Capacity planning in virtual environments also requires an understanding of how many individual workloads can be safely stacked together on a singly physical host before unacceptable operational risks are introduced. Motioning and the ability to move VMs around present both opportunities and challenges in managing virtual capacity and levearging this whitespace to the best advantage of the organization.

CiRBA’s Placement Intelligence Technology™ enables organizations to optimize and govern workload placements based on the technical, business, and resource constraints that dictate what should go where, when. CiRBA provides dynamically updated analytics to balance workloads, control motioning, and proactively manage capacity within virtualized environments according to risk, performance and financial goals.