VM /ETC

What is VMware’s Capacity Planner tool and how do you get a copy? It’s a common question. Bottom line is that Capacity Planner is not a tool that can be downloaded by a Systems Administrator, but it is a tool that VMware partners use to perform a Capacity Analysis for Virtualization services project.

To understand the Capacity Planner tool let’s first back up and understand the Capacity Analysis services project. When you start to consider how to migrate your data center to VI:

• You need to size server hardware which will become ESX hosts, and you need to know how many ESX hosts you’ll deploy.
• You’d like to explore different vendor hardware platform scenarios for your ESX hosts.
• You need to understand which of your physical servers will consolidate well and which ones are not good virtualization canidates.
• You’d like to figure out a good VM to Host consolidation ratio.
• You need to estimate your total disk storage for the VI solution.

Capacity Planner helps you

A typical Capacity Analysis project is 4 weeks. It’s 4 weeks because you want to understand when your servers are the busiest, like at the end of the month when all reports are run, and when your servers are idle. During the project the performance data is uploaded to VMware’s database where your data is analysed and then presented to the VMware partner for use in generating consolidation scenarios. The consolidation scenarios are finally delivered to the customer in a report. The most common format of the delivered report these days is the Basic Consolidation Estimate .ppt, or BCE.

VMware’s Capacity Planner Overview web page describes it best:

Gain insight into IT resource utilization and develop a virtualization roadmap for server containment and consolidation with VMware Capacity Planner. Professional services based on VMware Capacity Planner can help you:

• Assess the current state of your IT infrastructure with comprehensive performance metrics
• Plan for capacity optimization through detailed utilization analysis and benchmarks
• Design an optimal solution with scenario modeling

VMware Capacity Planner – VMware

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