I was sketching out some diagrams today and started to think about how the time frame that we analyze and how it relates to Capacity Management.  The concept of "Working" or "Business" hours actually plays a vital role in how capacity is accounted for and accommodated in the datacenter.

I often relate introducing business hours into capacity management to being a decision point during a breakup.  There is a line that is drawn between "Lets remain friends" and "Never call me again".  With business hours, we need to determine how big of a window we want to consider for the data we care about.  This is going to be different for every organization out there.  For the purpose of simplicity, let's look at a window in which I only care about data between 6am and 6pm.

Welcome to a slightly belated Part 3 of our elementary capacity management series.  You can catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 respectively.  For this post, I want to discuss the concept of Adjustments and Tuning in the environment.  Adjustments, most simply stated, are shifts that impact the amount of capacity available; either positively or negatively.  Tuning is a type of adjustment that is done to optimize how resources are being utilized in order to gain additional capacity.  It's important to understand that in any type of computing environment there is almost never a completely linear growth trend.  The environment and utilization trend is constantly changing.  If we look at how Adjustments and Tuning can impact the environment resulting in these shifting trends, we can start to understand a much broader set of questions such as the following:

• If I add more capacity how many more objects can I add?
• If I add more capacity how will that impact when I will run out?
• If I lose capacity can I still run the remaining workload?
• If I lose capacity how many fewer objects can I add?
• If I lose capacity how will that impact when I will run out?
• If I optimize my existing capacity how many more objects can i add?
• If I optimize my existing capacity how will that impact when I will run out?

Next week (May 10th) is the Philadelphia VMUG taking place. It´s a full day event and it will be packed with a lot of good sessions and the solutions exchange where vendors show their latest and greatest stuff.

For more detailed information about the location and sessions, see: http://info.vmware.com/content/VMUG_Conference_Agenda?ug=ph&src=ws

I will be presenting 11.30 am on the topic "Top Virtual Performance Lessons Learned".

Attachments:

VMUG_Philadelphia.pdf

[ ]

3941 Kb

This second of my four part Capacity Management series talks about the concept of understanding Trending and Forecasting as it relates to Capacity Management.  The first, and most important concept that we must understand is the concept of utilization.  Understanding utilization is vital to the success of any cloud or virtualization project that is undertaken.  Without a clear grasp on the current utilization of an environment, there is no way to trend historical data for the purpose of accurate forecasting of the future.

For those that missed Part 1 of this series which served as the introduction, I'm going to strip technology out of this piece and provide more simplistic examples of what capacity really is.  This will allow these concepts to be applied to any technology stack, not just virtualization.