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SolarWinds IT Management Glossary

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What is Capacity Planning

Capacity planning has taken on a more critical role within IT with the adoption of virtualization. When applications ran on dedicated hardware capacity planning was relatively simple as you could look at each application in isolation. With virtualization resulting in the sharing of computer and storage resources, capacity planning requires sophisticated modeling of the usage of resources over time, the ability to do 'what-if' scenario analysis, and even optimize the usage of existing resources to extend the existing resources further.

SolarWinds FREE Tools Related to Capacity Planning

VM Console

What do you do when a virtual machine is running amuck—or not running at all—and you just want to restart it without slogging through vCenter™ or vSphere™? With our free VM Console you can bounce that blue-screened troublemaker, track up/down status, take snapshots of all your VMs, and more!

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SAN Monitor

Quickly and easily monitor EMC®, Dell®, IBM®, and Sun® StorageTek™ storage arrays! Our free SAN Monitor delivers the real-time visibility you need to stay steps ahead of infrastructure evils that threaten to slow storage performance.

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VM-to-Cloud Calculator

Easily generate an inventory of your virtual machines and estimate the cost of moving your VMs to the cloud.

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VM Monitor

Track virtualization health at-a-glance with X-ray vision into your ESX Servers! Our free VM Monitor continuously monitors a VMware ESX Server and its virtual machines and delivers detailed virtual machine health statistics including VM name, guest OS, and VM state, as well as processor, memory, and network usage.

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SolarWinds Products Related to Capacity Planning

Storage Manager

Storage Manager makes it easy to manage the performance and growth of your multi-vendor storage environment. With end-to-end mapping of your physical and virtual infrastructure, Storage Manager delivers the comprehensive view into storage health that you need to troubleshoot problems quickly. Learn More »

Virtualization Manager

Virtualization Manager makes it easy to manage all the aspects of your virtual infrastructure by providing the tools to control VM sprawl, eliminate bottlenecks, optimize performance, track configuration changes, manage capacity, and track and showback departmental and business unit usage and costs. Learn More »