Today, Enterprise Systems has posted a new article written by Hyper9's own Jon Reeve describing a new approach to an old problem - capacity planning in a virtual environment.
In the article, Reeve describes the process of capacity planning by boiling it down to its most basic and easy to understand elements. He writes:
Capacity planning isn't new and it isn't brain surgery. In fact, whether it's about trying to fit visiting family into limited guest room space or packing your suitcase for an extended vacation, you've been solving capacity management issues for years. Understanding how to maximize space without sacrificing the experience is critical to capacity planning success. Different environments require different approaches, and capacity planning in a virtual infrastructure is no exception.
Reeve goes on to write:
Capacity planning has become a critical component of virtual deployments where sharing underlying hardware resources (and the contention that inevitably arises between them) is built in by design. It requires consolidated views across the myriad of IT silos of the virtual infrastructure, where consumption and waste can be understood in the context of the real-world business processes and applications. For this article, we define capacity planning as the process of ensuring that the IT infrastructure can support agreed-upon or target service levels in a cost-effective and timely manner.
At its simplest level, capacity planning can be thought of as the task of balancing supply (CPU, memory, storage, I/O) with demand (applications/SLAs). It seems like simple economics, but the virtual environment brings new twists to traditional capacity planning practices.
...
The article also goes on to list and define six critical elements of effective capacity planning in a virtual environment:
1. Identify performance issues
2. Forecast when resources will run out based on historical trending
3. Estimate how many more VMs can be added to the virtual infrastructure
4. Understand capacity usage from both an application and workload perspective
5. Tie it back to the business
6. Generate useful management reports that are actually useful
You can read the entire article and get more detail at Enterprise Systems.