VMware Infrastructure 3: Capacity Planner

VMware Capacity Planner is an IT capacity planning tool that provides an integrated set of analysis, planning and decision support functionality that enables accelerated, more accurate and benchmarked infrastructure assessment services. Delivered as a hosted application service, it enables comprehensive capacity planning, virtualization and server consolidation assessments. These assessments in turn help in intelligently virtualizing and consolidating data center infrastructure, redeploying strategic IT assets, and optimizing workload capacity utilization.

What is Capacity Planner?

Consolidation assessment and decision support tool for sales and consulting.
Data collection: Discover inventory assets and performance metrics of physical infrastructure.
Modeling: Define and run multiple scenarios to optimize the datacenter and server utilization.
Business planning: Trend and forecast future capacity and resource needs and optimize against Industry Averages.

What is Capacity Planner?

Consolidation assessment and decision support tool for sales and consulting.
Data collection: Discover inventory assets and performance metrics of physical infrastructure.
Modeling: Define and run multiple scenarios to optimize the datacenter and server utilization.
Business planning: Trend and forecast future capacity and resource needs and optimize against Industry Averages.

How Is Capacity Planner Used?

VMware Capacity Planner is used as an analysis, planning and decision support tool to direct the key phases within a variety of infrastructure assessment projects, as described below:

Assess - the current state of an infrastructure’s workload capacity through comprehensive discovery and inventory of IT assets. Measure server loads and capacity utilization across various elements of the IT infrastructure—including by function,location and environment.

Plan - for capacity optimization through detailed utilizat ion analysis ,benchmarking, trending and identification of capacity optimization alternatives. Identify resources and establish plan for virtualization, hardware purchase or redeployment.

Monitor - resource utilization through anomaly detection and alerts based on benchmarked thresholds. Help generate recommendations to ensure ongoing capacity optimization.

Decide - on the optimal solution by evaluating various alternatives through scenario modeling and “what-if” analyses. Determine which alternative best meets the pre-defined Criteria.

What Value does Capacity Planner Offer?

VMware Capacity Planner offers a range of infrastructure analysis and planning capabilities that delivers critical insights and decision support required within a variety of infrastructure assessment projects. VMware Capacity Planner offers users the following key benefits:

• Faster, more accurate, benchmarked IT capacity assessments
• Improved visibility of complex IT environments
• Increased productivity, reduced complexity and improved predictability of IT infrastructure

Capacity Planner Themes

Enables capacity assessments to be completed faster, easier and more reliably.
Provide productivity enhancements to better collect and analyze.

• Reduce monitoring, analysis, and management time
• Manage multiple projects concurrently
• Deliver and manage more assessments

Provide usability enhancements to increase ease of use

• More wizards to step users through assessment process
• Easier, more intuitive navigation of dashboards
• Reduce learning costs to broaden user base

Provide performance enhancements to increase service quality

• Simpler, streamlined web pages for quicker loading and access.
• Better scalability and reliability of service.
• Increase adoption and usage due to better product performance.

Capacity Planner: Productivity
Productivity Enhancements
Templates : Copy or clone objects across companies

• Saves time and work effort by encouraging re-use of best practices.
• Can be used for Consolidation Scenarios, New Hardware,Notifications and Reports.
• Consolidation Wizard: Simplify creation of consolidation scenarios.
• Improves workflow and usability of the consolidation process.
• Facilitates grouping and selecting new hardware process during consolidation.
• Remote Configuration: Change collector configurations remotely Improve remote troubleshooting such as changing log levels.

Capacity Planner: Usability
Usability Enhancements

• Display actionable data to allow more rapid response
• Status on inventory and performance statistics,
• failures and uploads

• Self-retrieve a forgotten Username or Password
• View your role and membership in all companies
• Pagination: Better data organization and layout
• Provide pagination to speed up page, report and table rendition
• Pagination setting is customizable per user in My Options User Interface: Cleaner, more streamlined UI and navigation New design for graphs/ charts, tabs, tables, reports and icons
• Consistency in design and look-and-feel between all pages

Capacity Planner: Performance
Performance Enhancements
Discovery Tuning: Faster discovery of assets

• Discover up to 2000 systems within 4 hours per each Collector
• Perform multiple discovery tasks in parallel, which speeds up the discovery process
  Automatic Updates: Keep up-to-date with the latest release
• Configure Collector to automatically self-update when a new version is available
• Update occurs seamlessly during normal data synchronization
  Platform Support: Collect against more systems
• Collect AIX 5.2 and 5.3 systems (limited support for 4.3)
• Better error messaging for Unix/ Linux systems