As you move through your virtualization journey, you need to
understand and have a good handle on capacity. Common questions that arise with
Virtualization Administrators include: when will I run out of resources across
my disk space?
Across my memory and compute
resources? Across my storage I/O and network I/O resources?
How many more VMs can I fit in each of my
clusters? And where is the best place to locate a new VM?
Similarly, I need to understand proactively when am I going
to run out the fastest? Which clusters are going to be depleted the fastest of CPU,
memory or storage resources?
With the Capacity Manager within Virtualization Manager, we
also allow you to build complex capacity scenario plans.
We treat resources very much like a supply and demand
problem. On the supply side, I have my host and datastores providing space for
VMs.
On the usage side, I have my VMs that are actually consuming
resources. So I can see in this case how
many VMs I can locate for small, medium, and large VM across each of my
clusters.
We also provide you with an instantaneous capacity snapshot,
so I can understand where I'm at right now from each of my resource types
including storage I/O and how much headroom I have to locate new VMs, where my
bottleneck might be in terms of being able to locate new VMs and how much
headroom I have, for example, on CPU or memory or storage.
With the advanced “What-If” modeling features of
Virtualization Manager, we also allow you to model complex, different scenarios
such as: What if I was to add were to add additional virtual machines? What if I was to have a host or two hosts for
example in each of my clusters failover or I need to take down those hosts for maintenance? How would that affect my capacity plan?
Similarly, I can change the outage thresholds for the
capacity plan. I don't need to just understand when I'm going to run out of a
100% of resources, but maybe I want to understand when I’m going to hit 70 or
80 percent. Commonly, I have to deal
with lead time or procurement issues, which means I need enough time to be able
to procure my new hardware to accommodate my growth in my virtual environment.
With Virtualization Manager, we give you a comprehensive
handle on capacity management and your virtual environment.
Virtualization Manager can be downloaded from SolarWinds.com
and it’s a simple virtual appliance deployment so that you can be up and
running within an hour.