VM /ETC

So, I spent most of my day today preparing for a VMware Capacity Planner Virtualization Assessment that I will be starting next week. In typical fashion, the client had many questions and concerns about preparing for the installation of the data collector in their environment. To answer those questions I assembled a very informative and lengthy list of common questions and answers from the official VMware FAQs and I am posting the results of that effort here at VM /ETC.

The FAQs I used to create this post seem to be only available to VAC partners who’s accredited VCPs have completed the necessary Capacity Planner services training. Upon completing the training a VCP is assigned a log in to the VMware Data Warehouse Portal where Capacity Planner data collector’s uploads are processed into consolidation scenarios. Here, from this portal, is where these FAQ documents can be downloaded. I happen to be an accredited VCP, so I have access to the FAQs. All of the FAQs clearly state they are customer documents so I am now providing this information here. I’m not sure why these documents aren’t publicly available because I am sure they would help generate more interest in Virtualization Assessment service projects.

The remainder of this post combines VMware’s information from 3 different documents – the Capacity Planner Technical, Security, and Sales FAQs. The individual documents are provided on the VM /ETC Files page and are linked at the bottom of this post. I have trimmed down or omitted most of the FAQs in this post (and it’s still a lot of info to read), but check out the full .pdfs for more details and other FAQs I left out.

I recommend you at least skim through some of these very popular Q & A’s:

• How is Capacity Planner sold?
• Why should we add Capacity Planner when we already have so many other tools installed?
• What ports need to be open?
• What operating systems does it discover?
• What impact does collection have on my network?
• What impact does collection have on my servers?
• How are the utilization figures determined?
• What are the security features within the software?

Go get a fresh cup of coffee or your favorite beverage and then enjoy!

Capacity Planner Sales, Security and Technical FAQ

Licensing

How is Capacity Planner sold?

Capacity Planner is sold as a service to customers by one of VMware’s selected partners or as a service from VMware PSO. Customers are unable to purchase licenses for their sole use; a partner always needs to be involved.

How is license usage monitored; for example, if a customer buys 500 server licenses, what prevents the customer from deploying it on, for example, 600 servers?

Capacity Planner support monitors actual versus expected server numbers analyzed and works with partner and Capacity Planner sales on discrepancies.

What if a customer discovers a need for more server licenses?

The customer should order more. In the future, customers should be aware that they have the option of using the Collector for free to discover servers. Discovery provides a server count, the operating system on each server, and typically identifies the type of server.

Competitors

What are the key competitive products?

The primary competitive products are IBM CDAT tool and PlateSpin PowerRecon.
Other enterprise capacity planning tools, usually agent based, include BMC Perform/Predict, Hyperformix, TeamQuest, and Metron Athene. There are overlaps with inventory, asset management, and performance management solutions. Therefore, some people might consider IBM Director, HP Openview, BMC Patrol, and Mercury SiteScope as competitive products.

How does Capacity Planner compete with competitor’s products?

Capacity Planner is faster because it is doesn’t use an agent and does provide automated analytics and decision support. Capacity Planner is more accurate because it can discover and enumerate the entire (heterogeneous) IT infrastructure within an enterprise through a variety of means. Capacity Planner correlates inventory and performance data to provide more accurate and meaningful analysis than most other tools on the market. It also simulates various planning scenarios, including virtualization and procurement, to help test for accuracy before implementing the best solution. Capacity Planner’s Information Warehouse is a unique differentiator that houses a growing set of industry reference data that capacity planners can leverage to drive intelligent, benchmarked IT capacity decisions for the enterprise. Furthermore, Capacity Planner can provide anomaly detection and ongoing recommendations based on these industry benchmarks to ensure capacity optimization for the enterprise.

Is Capacity Planner a performance management tool?

Although Capacity Planner collects performance statistics and makes them available for review, the tool is not a typical event management or real-time performance management tool. The main purpose of the product and service is to identify candidates for consolidation using virtualization. The tool can also be used to provide advice around tuning servers and applications prior to consolidation or virtualization.

Potential Difficulties

Why should we add Capacity Planner when we already have so many other tools installed?

Many organizations collect similar data using various different tools (event management, asset management, patch management, and so on); however, the data from all these tools usually resides in different databases or datastores. With Capacity Planner, all the relevant data can be collected quickly with little overhead on the collected systems. In addition, many applications sit on the shelf because of the amount of time and expertise required to deploy them. Our agent-less technology alleviates this issue. Most clients install our software within minutes and are reviewing inventory and performance data within a couple of hours. In most environments, our solution is fully deployed within a couple of days.

Security Methods

How do we know our data is safe?

Our client base, which includes Global 2000 banks, insurance companies, and retailers, researched this issue and concluded that the risk of transferring data that is not sensitive through Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption over HTTP was low to nonexistent. Sensitive information like IP addresses reside only at the customer site. Customers access their information through a secure, Web-based dashboard and manage user IDs and passwords so that they can implement the same password restrictions as required by their internal security policy. An example of transferred data is available.

What are the security features within the software?

To keep sensitive data secure, Capacity Planner collects the data securely and stores it using highly secure methods. Our collection methods use standard OS APIs. These APIs are the same APIs that you use to copy files from one system to the next and to logon securely. These APIs have been accepted as C-2 level secure and are updated with hot-fixes every time a problem is found. The data is stored in a local database that is protected by file system security. Passwords are encrypted before being stored. Our products have the ability to send information through the Internet to our Web site for analysis and comparison. All data sent and received from our Web site uses HTTPS. This is a secure transmission protocol that is used by all institutions.

The basic security methods are the following:

· Local administrator accounts are required on all target servers.

· Accounts are stored and encrypted on the Collector server in an Access database.

· Capacity Planner uses a RC4 password encryption with a private key.

· Passwords are not shown in clear text on the Manager.

· CSV files sent from Collector to Capacity Planner data center do not contain usernames, passwords, IP addresses, or share information. CSV files do contain domain names and server names.

Requirements

What is the necessary inventory information that you need to conduct an assessment?

For server consolidation and other capacity planning activities, project teams need to know detailed hardware information around four core hardware components: processors, memory, disk, and network interface cards. Detailed intelligence for applications, services, and shares is equally valuable.

What administrative rights are needed to access servers?

On a Windows environment, users enter either global, domain, or individual administrative rights to access remote servers into the Manager. UNIX and Linux systems require root access to access the appropriate data from the software.

What ports need to be open?

We need the following ports open: 135, 137 through 139, and 445. If there are servers behind firewalls that can’t be opened or will be challenging to open, it is often easier to install a Collector inside the firewall.

Installation

Do I need to install agents?

With Capacity Planner, you do not need to install any agents on the target servers. Capacity Planner is agent-less software that collects across server infrastructure, leveraging existing data sources already on the systems. As a result, Data Collectors only need to be installed to pull the data from the target systems.

Do I need to purchase other software or hardware to run this tool?

Unlike other competing products, Capacity Planner was designed to leverage basic hardware and software requirements. Capacity Planner requires a Windows 2000 or newer operating system on a laptop, desktop, or server with at least 1GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and 250 MB of free disk space.

What is the appropriate operating system for the Collector and Manager?

Capacity Planner requires Windows 2000 or 2003 with an ASCII language operating system. VMware mandates US English Windows 200x operating system as best practice.

Discovery and Collection

What does a discovery collect?

Discovery using Capacity Planner is simply a system count of the environment. There is relatively little information beyond a physical count that is provided. The discovery enumerates the list using the Active Directory, IP Scanning, DNS queries, and NETBIOS options. It does not verify that the machine is online or accessible.

What operating systems does it discover?

Capacity Planner collects from Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, 2000, and 2003; Red Hat Linux 8 and 9 and Enterprise Linux (ES/AS/WS) 3 and 4; SUSE Linux 8, 9, 10, and Enterprise Server 9; HP-UX 10.x, 11.0, 11.11, 11.22 (PA-RISC) and 11.23 (Itanium); and Solaris 7, 8, 9, and 10 (Sparc) and 9 and 10 (x86) Operating Environments.

How are discovery and inventory different?

Discovery is a free count of the number of systems in the customer’s environment. Inventory is a paid service that collects all the hardware, software, and services inventory data.

What inventory data is collected?

Capacity Planner collects hardware, software, and services inventory data.

What performance metrics are collected by Capacity Planner?

Capacity Planner collects from targeted servers 300+ core performance statistics and additional relevant statistics for specific applications. This low-overhead query collects performance metrics from the four main data groups of processor, memory, disk drive, 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 is then correlated with the previously collected inventory data.

What impact does collection have on my network?

Capacity Planner typically only uses 20,000 bytes during data collection across a network.

What impact does collection have on my servers?

The impact on the target server varies, depending on what is collected. Windows systems traditionally are affected less than 1% utilization. UNIX systems might peak at 5 to 10% utilization during inventory collection cycles.

How long does Capacity Planner take to collect inventory?

This varies depending on a number of factors, such as the Collector system, location of target systems, and network speed. Traditionally, Capacity Planner collects inventory on one system every 20 seconds. Multiple systems can be collected at the same time as a configurable parameter.

How long do we need to collect performance data?

VMware recommends a minimum of three weeks of data collection to start to compile a server profile with at least 1,000 performance samples. In addition, performance collection over three to four weeks provides server trending on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis that could be critical to understanding when servers are peaking. In addition, the longer you collect data, the more valuable it is.

Does Capacity Planner collect application statistics?

Yes, it collects limited application statistics that are written to Microsoft Performance Monitor (PerfMon).

Utilization and Performance Counters

How are the utilization figures determined?

Utilization and performance counters are determined by collecting multiple samples each hour of each day for each week. The statistics for each hour over a week are correlated together to determine the average, hourly, prime time, and non-prime time utilization for each hour. Average utilization is typically the average utilization during the prime time hours of 7 AM to 6 PM, for example, or for the entire 24-hour period. Capacity Planner also maintains weekly summary statistics that track maximum observed, minimum observed, average, hourly, prime time, non-prime time, and weekend loads. Capacity Planner also 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. The peak load is determined by evaluating each metric over the most recent four weeks of collection and locating the hour of the day that has the highest average value. It is not the maximum observed value as any statistical analysis eliminates the high and low values from consideration.

What is the difference between peak hour performances versus average utilization?

Peak hour is the one hour in the twenty-four hour period that has the highest average utilization. Average utilization is typically the average utilization during the prime time hours of 7 AM to 7 PM, for example, or for the entire twenty-four hour period. The difference between these two metrics is significant.

Figure: Peak vs. Average Utilization

Assume that servers A, B, C, and D in Figure 1 were Microsoft Exchange servers that were to be consolidated based on average utilization. If this were the case and all peaked to 40 percent utilization in the morning and at the lunch hour, the server would run out of capacity at those critical times.

As another example, assume that the servers in Figure 1 were Citrix servers. On average, most Citrix machines that Capacity Planner has monitored run low CPU utilization, low memory utilization, and extremely low disk utilization. However, the largest variable is network utilization. During peak loads, usually in the morning during sign-on, the network traffic may go from an average of 100,000 bytes per second to millions of bytes per second. If one used average utilization or even prime-time utilization metrics for consolidating a Citrix server, problems would likely arise.

Identifying the peak-hour average provides capacity planners with an upper threshold for consolidating servers. How important is the difference between prime time averages and the peak hour average? Analysis of data in the information warehouse reveals that the peak-hour average is two times higher than the prime-time average for 68 percent of all servers. For 32 percent of all servers, the peak-hour average is five times higher than the prime-time average.

The standard installation samples each server once an hour. Are all servers sampled simultaneously or divided across the time period? Can this be configured?

Servers are sampled in groups of ten servers. They are not all done simultaneously; instead, they are sampled in order until all are sampled. Performance collection is a configurable option within the Manager.

How does Capacity Planner calculate peak hour and other calculations?

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, non prime time, and weekend loads. Capacity Planner also maintains a summary for the most recent four weeks of performance statistics on these same criteria. The summary is what 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.

Hyperthreading

How does Capacity Planner handle x86 processors that have the hyperthreading feature enabled?

Capacity Planner detects hyperthreading based on the model for the server sent to Capacity Planner. If the chassis model is sent, Capacity Planner checks to see if the hyperthread flag has been turned on for that model in the information warehouse. If the hyperthread flag is on, Capacity Planner ignores half of their CPUs. If they send four, Capacity Planner only enters two into the system, assuming that they did not go through the process to turn hyperthreading off.

Capacity Planner flags a chassis as being hyperthreaded when it is either manually entered or detected by comparing the maximum number of CPUs allowed in the chassis to the number of CPUs being reported. If a chassis can only have four processors, but inventory is sent showing eight processors for that model, Capacity Planner turns on the hyperthread flag for that model.

Proposed New Hardware

Does proposed new hardware have VMware automatically included on it?

Proposed new hardware does not automatically have VMware included on it.

How can I help make VMware recommendations?

When leveraging Capacity Planner to run consolidation or virtualization scenarios, users can create a new server with specific hardware specifications and either VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, or standard Microsoft, Linux, or UNIX operating systems. These systems comprise a group of servers to run consolidation scenarios against. The scenarios will allow users to pick their various future platforms and operating system combinations, and then run scenarios to determine how many proposed systems are needed.

How does Capacity Planner determine the native MHz for proposed new hardware?

Capacity Planner reduces the amount of native capacity when multi-processors are involved. The rule of thumb in the industry is to reduce the amount of native capacity available to 80% of the original rating for the second processor. Subsequent processors are multiplied by .8 raised to the power of the slot number of the CPU. So the third CPU contributes .8 raised to the second power multiplied times the rated speed (the third CPU is in slot 2 because slot numbers begin with 0). If this is a 64-bit processor, the percentage is raised to 90% due to improvements in the technology. Therefore, the variables are the number of processors, the rated speed, and the slot number.

Platforms

Is VMware comparing like with like when comparing Intel and AMD based platforms? If people believe the AMD CPU is more powerful, is their a way to apply a correction factor for AMD platforms?

AMD Opteron is not more powerful. It is a different technology that provides better throughput under certain circumstances. In an Intel platform, all the processors make memory requests through a common physical interface. AMD Opteron has a separate physical interface for each processor. The bottleneck to memory has been removed, and the speed to the memory is faster as well. This is the big difference. It is also a 64-bit platform, but that alone does not offer an advantage over an Intel 64-bit platform. There are two things to consider. First, are you comparing a 32-bit to a 64-bit platform? Second, are you comparing Intel to AMD Opteron?

The only way you see significant improvements in throughput is in a memory intensive application. Most applications are not total random memory access intensive, only about 2%. If a system is paging due to limitations on the file system cache, 64 bit may solve the problem by allowing a much larger file system cache. If a system is paging because every reference to memory is for new data that has not been read into memory before, this is a disk access and memory speed issue, primarily disk access. If you have a system that is constantly pulling data from memory but not requiring disk access, this favors the AMD Opteron. This typically means large database servers. When we combine a number of systems in a virtualized environment, this creates a memory intensive situation on the ESX Server overall and favors AMD Opteron. There is no way to apply an algorithm to the statistics that would show lower processor utilization. The processor will not run at a lower utilization, but the throughput and response times will be better. Because it cannot be represented statistically, the technology and the ramifications are explained to clients. Essentially, the statistics point out that running an AMD Opteron at 65% utilization and Intel at 50% utilization provides greater throughput with AMD Opteron.

Transferring Data

Are there other ways to transfer data besides HTTPS?

HTTPS is the default transfer mechanism, but you have the ability to transfer data through FTP, email, or burning the data to a CD.

Can the data be exported?

Users can export data from either the Manager or Dashboard to a CSV file.

Reports

Can you create custom reports?

Dashboard includes Dynamic Reports that permits users to create customizable reports and export them to CSV files for further analysis.

Downloads

1. Capacity Planner Sales FAQ (1059)
2. Capacity Planner Security FAQ (1481)
3. Capacity Planner Technical FAQ (2616)

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