VMTN Blog

Toni Verbeiren has been doing some thinking about capacity planning and Capacity Planner:

Capacity Planning: What to monitor and how to interpret

• Are you aware of the utilization of your systems?  Even of your workstation?
• Would you have any idea how many of your servers could be placed on a virtualization platform with a specific set of hardware characteristics?
• Would you know when your mail server had the hardest time managing inbox the last couple of weeks?

Probably the answer is 'no'. Maybe the answer is 'I don't care'?

Most companies do care, because of several reasons: cost, manageability, flexibility, scalability, environment, space, etc.

A little scripting gives you access to your data offline for more analysis:

• VMware Capacity Planner: taking the data offline (Part 1: Introduction)
• VMware Capacity Planner: taking the data offline (Part 2: Cygwin & wget)
• VMware Capacity Planner: taking the data offline (Part 3: Getting CSV data)

And some articles on analyzing performance data:

• Performance Monitoring: Averages and Peaks
• Performance Monitoring: More about Peak
• Performance Monitoring: Correlations