VMware Capacity Planner- Creating a Capacity Blueprint

8/10/2019 VMware Capacity Planner- Creating a Capacity Blueprint

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Capacity Planning:

The Blueprint for Server Consolidation

W H I T E P A P E R


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Table of Contents

Executive Summary .......................................................... ...................................... 3

Growing Support for Consolidation ..................................................... .................. 3

Standard Approaches to Capacity Planning ................................................. ......... 3

Inventory .................................................. ......................................................... 3

Utilization of Current Capacity ...................................................... ................... 3

Utilization Variation over Time ...................................................... ................... 4

Analysis: Determining How to Consolidate ...................................................... 4

CapacityPlanner............................................................................................. ......... 5

Analyze ..................................................... ......................................................... 6 Plan ........................................................... ......................................................... 6

Model ........................................................ ......................................................... 6

Monitor ..................................................... ......................................................... 6

How CapacityPlanner Works ................................................................ .................. 6

Data Collector .................................................... ................................................ 6

Data Manager .................................................... ................................................ 7

Information Warehouse ......................................................... ............................ 7

Data Analyzer .................................................... ................................................ 7

CapacityPlanner Dashboard.............................................................................. 7

Rigorous Information Collection..................................................... .................. 7

Intelligent Capacity Analysis ........................................................... .................. 7


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Executive Summary

Server consolidation has become a key element in IT planning

in recent years because it offers a range of benefits from

lower hardware, software, and personnel costs to improved

reliability and the management efficiencies of standardized

infrastructure.

Virtualization is a key enabling technology encouraging the

server consolidation trend and is now becoming a core part of

strategic IT planning.

Planning for server consolidation through virtualization can bea complicated undertaking. Large IT environments have doz-

ens sometimes hundreds or thousands of servers running

a multitude of applications and services for a wide range of

departments, owners, and business domains. Deciding how

to best combine these into fewer, more manageable physical

resources, while at the same time planning for future expansion,

unexpected demands, and organizational changes, can be a

daunting task.

VMware Capacity Planner provides insights into the server

resources available in the IT infrastructure and the ways those

resources are being used. It integrates and displays data on

server inventory and performance so system analysts have the

information they need to build the greatest possible efficiency

into a server consolidation plan.

Growing Support for Consolidation

Server consolidation has been a hot topic in recent years.

Industry analysts from such organizations as IDC and Gartner

along with writers for top trade publications have found that

server consolidation offers such benefits as:

Reduced hardware and maintenance costs

More efficient use of datacenter space

Simplified and more consistent operating environment

More effective management of enterprise IT resources

Improved reliability and flexibility

Virtualization has shown itself to be one of the most important

approaches for enabling consolidation. It is being adopted as a

core part of strategic IT planning in organizations of all sizes.

This white paper explains the issues involved in capacity

planning, why Capacity Planner is the ideal tool for addressing

those issues, and how it can achieve specific consolidation

results.

Capacity Planning: The Blueprint for Server Consolidation

Standard Approaches to Capacity Planning

To chart the most effective approach to consolidation in a

particular IT environment, analysts need a variety of information

on the existing infrastructure and data on how the hardware in

that existing infrastructure is being used.

Inventory

To make good decisions about capacity planning, and about

server consolidation as a step in the process, the project team

must begin by obtaining a detailed understanding of what

capacity is currently present. A starting point of any inventoryexercise is simply to count the existing resources. For server

consolidation and other capacity planning activities, project

teams also need detailed information on four core hardware

components: processors, memory, storage, and network

adapters. Detailed knowledge of applications, services, and

shares is equally valuable.

Traditionally, consultants and customers have to collect the

data manually a step that can be costly. Agent-based man-

agement tools can help, but they are seldom fully implemented

across an entire enterprise. The gaps may be a result of budget

constraints, lack of internal process, or lack of knowledge about

where the organizations servers reside. Unknown servers may

exist because of purchases by independent departments,

recent mergers, or refreshes that did not include procedures

for disposal, among other reasons. The average enterprise

underestimates the number of servers in its environment by 20

percent. In some cases this miscalculation reaches 50 percent.

Utilization of Current Capacity

Besides knowing what capacity exists, the project team needs

to analyze how that capacity is being used. The team might

gauge performance in a multitude of ways; however, a core

set of performance metrics can identify the utilization and

throughput for such key server resources as processor, memory,

network adapter, and storage. It is also important to capture

additional performance metrics for specific applications.

Inventory tools focus on inventory data collection. Performance

tools focus on performance data collection. Few tools provide

both sets of data. If a tool collects both, the tool is typically

agent-based. As in the case of inventory information, an agent-

based tool's data is accurate and complete only if the agent

software is installed on every computer.


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To turn the performance data into useful information, it must

be correlated with inventory data. Many organizations attempt

to use a performance monitoring tool by itself. The perfor-

mance logs paint a picture like that shown in Table 1.

Server CPU% Utilization

A 10%

B 20%

C 30%

D 40%

Overall performance 25%

Table 1: Uncorrelated Performance

For server consolidation and capacity management, the conclu-

sion that utilization is 25 percent is inaccurate. When inventoryand performance information are combined, as in Table 2, the

results give a more useful picture.

Server CPU%

Utilization

CPU

Capacity

Utilization

A 10% 3000MHz 300MHz

B 20% 1500MHz 300MHz

C 30% 500MHz 150MHz

D 40% 200MHz 80MHz

Overall

capacity

utilization

5200MHz 830MHz

16%

Table 2: Correlated Performance

The correlated data show more opportunity for server consoli-

dation, revealing that capacity utilization is only 16 percent.

The analysis based on percentage of CPU utilization alone was

distorted by the fact that older, slower CPUs were being used

more intensively than newer, faster CPUs. VMware has found

that 40 percent of the servers at a typical client site are slower

than 500MHz. Capacity Planner has found new, state-of-the-art

servers running below ideal capacity while older servers are

pushed to their capacity limits.

The capacity calculation is further complicated by the fact that

particular processors have different capabilities. To provide an

accurate picture of resource utilization, the analysis tools must

adjust for differences between 64-bit and 32-bit processors and

for differences between such new technologies as the AMD

Opteron and older technologies such as the Intel Xeon.

Utilization Variation over Time

Calculating average utilization has some value, but it is more

important to know peak hour utilization. Peak utilization will

differ within a 24-hour period based on the types of users,

applications on the server, scheduled maintenance, and so

forth. The peak hour is the one hour in the 24-hour period

that has the highest average utilization. Average utilization is

calculated using data collected between the hours of 7 a.m.

and 7 p.m., for example, or for the entire 24-hour period. The

difference between these two metrics is significant, as can be

seen in Figure 1.

Most system tools focus on real-time performance statistics or

24-hour averages. Many tools collect the data but then require

users to take time-consuming steps to extract and manipulate

performance data to determine the peak hour average. As

noted in other sections of this paper, it is impossible to collectdata from servers using these tools unless the servers have the

necessary system management tools installed. And it is unlikely

the system management tools will be installed on servers that

are not included in an official inventory.

Analysis : D etermining How to Consolidate

After all the necessary and relevant information has been

obtained, the most important step follows: using this informa-

tion to recommend changes that will consolidate the environ-

ment in an effective yet manageable way. Several consider-

ations should be addressed to achieve this goal.

First, the performance of the applications in the current envi-

ronment may not be optimized. For example, any of the follow-ing conditions can lead to excessive resource usage:

Poorly configured storage resources

Excessive virus scanning on Exchange systems

Bad index design on SQL Server systems

Excessive logon processing in Citrix environments

Although the project team could undertake a performance

study on each application and perform tests to see where addi-

tional efficiencies can be wrung out of a system, this process is

0.0%

5.0%10.0%

15.0%

20.0%

25.0%

30.0%

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23

Hour

Util ization Average

Figure 1: Comparison of hourly measurement vs. daily average of utilization


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very time-consuming and requires expertise beyond what most

IT organizations are willing to budget. A more attractive alterna-

tive is to compare utilization rates with industry averages and

ISV-provided benchmarks. After your team has identified the

applications that have the largest potential for improvement,

you can focus tuning efforts on those applications.

Getting the most efficient utilization in your current environ-

ment is the first step. Next, you must decide which servers can

be virtualized and run on the same system. This involves careful

consideration of such factors as:

Which workloads can be combined based upon the predicted

total resource utilization, a combination of CPU, memory,

storage, and network. This depends on the resource utilization

of each original server as well as thresholds for usage based

upon factors such as peak load.

Which servers are too obsolete to maintain, and what server

hardware can be purchased in order to achieve a net con-

solidation gain. For example, by retiring 10 old servers and

virtualizing their workloads to run on one new server, the

capital purchase cost could be more than offset by savings in

power, cooling, rack space, and network ports.

When you virtualize servers, you must also determine which

workloads to consolidate onto a particular host system. Some

customers are tempted to stack multiple virtualized servers

running the same application into a single ESX Server system.

This approach limits the consolidation opportunity, because like

applications compete for the same resources.

What you want your project team to do is determine what

resources each application requires, then match applications

that demand different resource allocations to maximize your

virtualization opportunity , as shown in Figure 2.

Similarly, you must evaluate the demand placed on various

servers at different times of the day. Your team needs to

combine virtualized servers in a way that balances load during

the day, as shown in Figure 3.

In principle, decisions like these can be made by an IT analyst

studying inventory and utilization data. In practice, however, the

mathematical complexity becomes unmanageable in any but

the smallest environments.

Clearly, a tool that can consider all these factors must be

one that is uniquely designed to embody all the principles

of capacity planning. While systems management tools from

Hewlett Packard, Mercury, IBM, and others are the workhorses

that keep systems running, and while these tools will continue

to evolve, Capacity Planner provides a complementary software

tool to answer the core questions you need to consider for a

consolidation project.

Capacity Planner

VMware Capacity Planner is an enterprise IT capacity planning

solution designed specifically to collect and analyze the data

you need to plan an effective server consolidation project.

It enables faster, more accurate, benchmarked infrastructure

assessments and provides project teams the integrated set of

analysis, planning, decision support, and monitoring functional-

ity they need to enable and accelerate server consolidation and

capacity optimization projects.

At the heart of VMware Capacity Planner is a unique

Information Warehouse, which houses a constantly growing

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

50%

50%

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

CPU

Memory

Disk

Network

B AD

BETT ER

Figure 2; Optimal consolidation based on resource type utilization

1AM

1PM

1AM

1AM

1PM

1AM

50%

1AM

1PM

1AM

1AM

1PM

1AM

1AM

1PM

1AM

1AM

1PM

1AM

50%

B AD

BET T ER

Figure 3: Optimal consolidation based on resource utilization over time


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set of industry reference data that is used to drive intel-

ligent, benchmarked IT capacity recommendations for the

enterprise.

VMware Capacity Planner delivers compelling value to

project teams and the organizations they work for by:

Automating and streamlining the capacity planning

cycle

Enabling accelerated, more accurate, benchmarked infra-

structure assessments

Guiding intelligent, objective capacity planning and

server consolidation recommendations

Driving increased productivity, reduced complexity, and

improved predictability of IT infrastructure

With Capacity Planner, your project team will be able to

answer questions they might not be able to answer with

certainty today, such as:

How many servers do we have?

How well are we utilizing them?

What is the right amount of capacity?

What are the options and what is the best recommenda-

tion?

How else can we better optimize our environment?

Capacity Planner provides the tools to assess your needs,

plan for and decide on consolidation strategies, and

monitor your infrastructure to maintain its efficiency.

Anal yze

Capacity Planner enables your project team consultants,

staff, or a combination of the two to conduct com-

prehensive assessments of your existing infrastructure

to assess how much IT capacity currently exists and how

well this capacity is being utilized. Agent-less implemen-

tation ensures discovery and inventory of all hardware

and software assets, providing a complete view of the IT

infrastructure. Capacity Planner then correlates key perfor-

mance metrics with inventory data to generate server load

profiles. This information enables your team to analyze and

evaluate how well current capacities are being utilized.

Plan

Capacity Planner enables your team to develop an effective

capacity optimization plan so you can determine exactly

how much IT capacity you really need, considering current

and future business needs. Capacity Planner enables

your team to analyze capacity utilization metrics, predict

capacity needs, forecast utilization trends, and compare

your data against industry benchmarks. Your team can also

identify opportunities and alternatives for capacity opti-

mization, whether they involve hardware refresh or new

purchases, disposing of old servers, migrating applications, rede-

ploying existing assets, or implementing a virtualization solution.

And Capacity Planner provides the ability to set success criteria,

constraints, and thresholds against which these alternatives can

be evaluated in the decision phase.

Model

During the modeling phase, Capacity Planner enables your

planning team to evaluate the various alternatives generated

in the planning phase. Your team can use scenario modeling to

test alternatives including purchase planning, virtualization, and

server consolidation. They can also conduct what-if analyses for

consolidation based on different groupings, thresholds, target

servers, and other factors. Your team can recommend the alter-

native that best meets the success criteria and represents quick

win, high-profile consolidation-success opportunities to build

business unit support. Capacity Planner then enables your team

to clearly articulate different scenario outcomes and present

recommendations in their assessment reports and project pro-

posals.

Monitor

Capacity Planner helps you continuously compare resource

utilization against benchmarked thresholds to ensure ongoing

capacity optimization. Your planning team can provide periodic

reports that monitor current capacity utilization and compare

them to industry benchmarks in order to detect anomalies

in utilization. Automated alerts and monitoring capabilities

enable your team to detect deviations in utilization trends,

predict capacity problems, and make timely troubleshooting

and optimization recommendations. They can continue to take

advantage of Capacity Planner capabilities to ensure that you

are able to manage unexpected or planned changes in capacity

requirements and utilization over time.

How Capacity Planner Works

VMware Capacity Planner is a Web-based capacity planning

application that combines inventory and utilization data. It

gathers the data without any need for agents installed on

the target systems. It then generates optimization recom-

mendations, enables modeling for server consolidation and

virtualization projects, and provides ongoing capacity planningdecision support.

The key components of Capacity Planner are the Data

Collector, the Data Manager, the Data Analyzer, the Information

Warehouse, and the Capacity Planner Dashboard.

Data Collector

The Data Collector discovers and inventories information from all

of the computers on your network or from only the subset that

you want to evaluate. It uses operating system APIs to communi-

cate with all targeted servers in order to collect the information


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required for analysis. No software or agent is ever installed on

any server. The Data Collector runs on a single workstation, and

all collections are executed using remote procedure calls.

Network traffic impact is minimal, and the CPU load on the

server targeted for data collection is less than 1 percent. This

minimal impact ensures completely unobtrusive visibility into

computing infrastructure.

Data Manager

The Data Manager provides an organized view of the collected

information and administrative control for the Data Collector.

This includes detailed and summary views and reports on all

discovered objects, collected inventory, and monitored per-

formance information. The Data Manager also includes data

synchronization capability that is used to send sterilized, anony-

mous data in the form of CSV files over Secure HTTP (HTTPS) tothe Information Warehouse.

Information Warehouse

The Information Warehouse is a central data warehouse hosted

in a remote, secure location in the United States where col-

lected client data is sent and stored. A data upload utility parses

the CSV files, then scrubs and processes this data before loading

it into the Information Warehouse. The Information Warehouse

also includes industry benchmark and research data derived

from data collected from hundreds of Capacity Planner client

sites. This data is not client-specific but instead represents

valuable industry averages such as industry performance

averages for different types of servers and maximum observedvalues or thresholds on server resources.

Data Analyzer

The Data Analyzer serves as the core analytical engine that

processes all the analysis required for intelligent capacity

planning. It includes advanced algorithms that solve capacity

optimization problems and supports analysis capabilities such

as trending, regressions, scenario modeling, anomaly detec-

tion and alerts. The Data Analyzer combines inventory and

performance data to develop server load profiles and calculate

insightful utilization metrics. It also aggregates data from differ-

ent collectors across client installations to prepare industry ref-

erence metrics (such as averages and ratios) that then serve asbenchmarks. Alerting capabilities enable users to define thresh-

olds and set alerts to monitor any data within the Information

Warehouse.

Capacity Planner D ashboard

The Dashboard is a Web-based, hosted application that delivers

a rich set of IT infrastructure analysis and capacity planning

capabilities to users through a zero-footprint browser interface

that requires no proprietary software installations or downloads.

The interface provides a rich set of analyses that enable you

to clearly visualize and gain insight into infrastructure. Reports

provided with the Dashboard range from inventory, perfor-

mance, and utilization reports to advanced analyses that enable

project teams to run what-if scenarios and generate intelligent

capacity optimization recommendations. In addition, users have

the ability to create and save their own custom reports. Users

can manipulate data, drill down from summary to detailed data,

apply filters, and sort data to gain different analytical views of

the information. Security and access control features ensure

secure, authenticated, and authorized access to and protection

of information from particular customer sites. Users can also

continue to monitor data and provide periodic reports and

capacity optimization recommendations.

Rigorous Information Collection

The Data Collector component of Capacity Planner installs

on a single workstation or server at a customer's site. Without

the need to install any agents on target machines, it discovers

servers and desktops by name and operating system within

minutes. Over the next few hours, Capacity Planner collects a

detailed inventory of all servers and desktops.

Capacity Planner collects from targeted servers more than 40

core performance statistics plus additional relevant statistics

for specific applications. This low-overhead query collects

performance metrics from the four main data groups of proces-

sor, memory, storage, and network utilization. For memory, for

example, Capacity Planner collects not only paging data or

what is available in bytes but also specific cache information

that affects the overall project decision strategy. This data isthen correlated with the previously collected inventory data.

Capacity Planner collects data every hour and calculates peak

hour utilization for each one-hour increment in the 24-hour day.

After several weeks, it identifies utilization for the busiest hour

in the week. Capacity Planner also maintains weekly summary

statistics that track maximum observed, minimum observed,

average, hourly, prime time, nonprime time, and weekend

loads. In addition, Capacity Planner maintains a summary for

the most recent four weeks of performance statistics on these

same criteria. The summary is used to determine peak load for

consolidation recommendations. Peak load is determined by

finding the hour of the day with the highest sustained load. It is

not a measure of maximum observed values.

After four weeks of per formance collection, trend lines become

valuable and performance projections can be made. These

projections are very important. For example, you do not want to

consolidate multiple loads into a single physical server only to

run out of capacity in a month.

Intelligent Capacity Analysis

Capacity Planner tracks and maintains current software vendor

benchmarks for servers in its Information Warehouse and


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produces an alerts table showing servers in a customer's organi-

zation for which performance data deviates from these vendor

values.

Capacity Planner tracks and maintains the industry averages

for software performance in its Information Warehouse

and produces an anomalies table showing the servers in a

customer's organization for which performance data deviates

from these average values. The industry averages are based on

the most recent four weeks of data collected from all Capacity

Planner sites.

For more information on virtualization and capacity planning,

visit www.vmware.com.


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VMware, Inc. 3145PorterDrive Palo Alto CA 94304 USATel 650-475-5000Fax 650-475-5001www.vmware.com

2006 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. Protected by one or more of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,397,242, 6,496,847, 6,704,925,

6,711,672, 6,725,289, 6,735,601, 6,785,886, 6,789,156 and 6,795,966; patents pending. VMware, the VMware boxes logo

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other jurisdictions. Microsoft, Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Linux is a

registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their

respective companies.

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VMware Capacity Planner- Creating a Capacity Blueprint