Capacity Management in A VMware Environment

Capacity Management in a
VMware Environment
Jeff Hunter, VCP, MCTS

Senior Systems Engineer
VMware
jhunter@vmware.com
Capacity Management Goals
Effective capacity management strives to ensure both:

• Efficiency – optimization of capacity
• Predictability – availability of capacity
IT Capacity To mitigate risk as well as plan for future

growth, IT capacity must be provisioned
higher than highest peak of your actual
capacity needs. Difference between
provisioned IT capacity and...
Capacity Demand
Demand Peak: acceptable headroom
Demand Valley: acknowledged waste
Copyright © 2009 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.
Items to Consider...
...that may affect capacity management and forecasting:
• Changes in application workload patterns - examples: Month-end
accounting jobs, upgrades/patches, backup jobs, antivirus scanning.
• Increasing utilization - examples: Adding more end-users to a business
intelligence system (meaning more queries), additional traffic on a retail
store e-commerce web site during the holidays.
• New projects coming to fruition that require additional computing resources
• Migration from a physical machine to a virtual machine...
• Is the physical machine an older, less-powerful model?
• Is the host for the virtual machine new, more-powerful?
• Business acquisitions
• Time required to add additional capacity
• Ability to reclaim capacity that is no longer in use
Challenges and Nuances in Virtual Environments
• Hypervisor effects (CPU): vSMP, shares, limits
• Hypervisor effects (memory): Transparent Page Sharing, ballooning
• Storage optimizations: Thin provisioning, linked-clones
• Clusters: VMotion, DRS, HA, FT
• Workload flux: VMs growing, addition of vCPUs and memory
Capacity Management Methods
Rule of Thumb “It worked

for me in the Subjective to experiential bias
Guesstimates
past…” “To be safe, I’ll
add an x% Overly conservative to be safe
Tacit knowledge
buffer…”
Homegrown Solution Time-consuming to build,

Excel spreadsheet maintain, prepare and analyze
SQL / Perl script Static snapshot in time
Purpose-Built Tools Automated and continuous

capacity intelligence
Off-the-shelf software
Enables informed, real-time
Best of breed expertise decision-making
Capacity Planning before Virtualizing
Performance monitoring tools can help get us started...
Windows Performance Monitor

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749249.aspx
3rd Party Tools

• Example: HP Performance Center, Collectl (Linux), etc.
Tools from VMware...
VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation

• Built into vCenter
• Basic analysis
VMware Capacity Planner
• Available to VMware employees (SEs, PSO) and partners
• More in-depth analysis and reporting
VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation
• Included with vCenter
• Provides basic consolidation estimate
• Convert To Virtual Machine from the vSphere Client
Data Collector
Detailed reports and recommendations
• Virtualization candidates and exceptions (machines that need further analysis)
Capacity Management After Virtualization
VMware vCenter 4 provides some metrics that are useful
• Resource utilization at the VM, host, cluster, virtual data center levels
• Resource allocation details
• Dashboard views
• Charts can be saved and printed
Capacity Management After Virtualization
VMware vCenter Analyze, forecast, and plan virtualized
CapacityIQ datacenter or desktop capacity
Benefits
Deliver the right capacity at the right time
Make informed planning, purchasing, and
provisioning decisions
Enable capacity to be utilized most efficiently and
cost-effectively
Key Features
Perform “What-If” impact analysis to model effect of
capacity changes
Identify and reclaim unused capacity
Forecast timing of capacity shortfalls and needs
CapacityIQ vSphere Client Plugin
Physical Machine Capacity
Total Capacity
Reserved
capacity
Total amount of physical resources
provisioned
Reserved Capacity = Unusable
Capacity
Total capacity
Remaining
capacity
Usable capacity
VMware HA failover commitments

ESX host overhead capacity
Capacity buffer for safety margin
capacity
Usable Capacity = Total Capacity –

Used
Unusable Capacity
13
CapacityIQ Use Cases
Visibility into  How many more VMs will fit in my current VI?
Available Capacity  What is my historical capacity utilization?
Efficient Use of  Are my VMs sized correctly?

Existing Capacity  Can I reclaim over-provisioned or unused capacity?
Ability to Predict  When will I run out of capacity?

Future Needs  What if I add, remove, reconfigure capacity?
Capacity Dashboard
At-a-glance charts and graphs
Datacenter to individual VM
Managed objects and compute resources
Deployed and remaining capacity perspectives
Trending and Forecasting
Identify current capacity usage trends and forecast timing of
potential capacity shortfalls and bottlenecks
Capacity Modeling
Impact analysis of capacity changes
Based on
What-if modeling scenarios: simulated
changes in capacity demand or supply
Historical resource trends
???
Virtualization-awareness
Recognizes VMware HA- and DRS-
enabled clusters, and factors those
Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3
into the predictions
VMware Infrastructure
What if I add more VMs?

Is there enough capacity?
VM Profiling
Analysis of VM behavior and
resource demands
Accounts for
CPU, Memory, Storage, Network
Peak and average resource demand over
time
Average VM Profile used as
basis for capacity estimates
Virtual Machine =
Basic Unit of Capacity
Consumption
Capacity Modeling
Perform “What-If” Impact Analysis
to Model Effect of Capacity Changes
 Hosts
 Virtual Machines
Capacity Modeling – Hosts
Specify configuration to model your capacity changes
Host count, CPU and memory configuration
Adding or removing hosts, changing host configuration (i.e. adding RAM)
CapacityIQ Views, Reports
Based on the object selected
in the navigation pane
Exported as pdf or csv
Customizable
Capacity Optimization
Identify and Reclaim Inefficient, Unused Capacity
Right-size or decommission unused or inefficient VMs
Use the capacity modeling to predict the savings
Eliminate waste and reduce costs in your organization
VM Profiling: Oversized and Undersized VMs
VM Sizing Opportunities Capacity
Oversized VMs:
VM has been allocated more capacity than it needs Demand
Undersized VMs:
VM needs more capacity than it has been allocated
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
Managing capacity in VMware environments is

Simple: delivers capacity insight at your fingertips. Delivered as
single virtual appliance. Integrated with vCenter and client.
Efficient: enables capacity to be utilized optimally.
Predictable: ensures capacity is always available to meet
business demands.
Capacity Intelligence
for VMware Infrastructure!
vCenter CapacityIQ Resources
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ product page

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Evaluation

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/index.php?p=capacityiq&lp=1
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Documentation

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/capacityiq_pubs.html

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Capacity Management in a

Jeff Hunter, VCP, MCTS

Effective capacity management strives to ensure both:

IT Capacity To mitigate risk as well as plan for future

Demand Valley: acknowledged waste

Rule of Thumb “It worked

Homegrown Solution Time-consuming to build,

SQL / Perl script Static snapshot in time

Purpose-Built Tools Automated and continuous

Windows Performance Monitor

3rd Party Tools

VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation

VMware HA failover commitments

Usable Capacity = Total Capacity –

Efficient Use of  Are my VMs sized correctly?

Ability to Predict  When will I run out of capacity?

What if I add more VMs?

VM Sizing Opportunities Capacity

Managing capacity in VMware environments is

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ product page

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Evaluation

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Documentation

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