By: Kyle Wassink
vRealize Operations (vROps) is a powerful analytics engine that simplifies data center monitoring by doing a lot of the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. Capacity badges, for example, help inform you of resource utilization, growth and efficiency. While applicable to many different layers of your data center, this functionality really shines when you look at your storage.
Using the analytics engine of vRealize Operations and storage management packs from Blue Medora, you can drastically simplify your capacity analysis tasks. In this blog post, I’ll cover two common scenarios: Identifying how much more storage you need to accommodate growth and how much storage you can reclaim due to overprovisioning.
How much more physical storage do I need to accommodate growth?
In this example, I’ll focus on a NetApp Aggregate that is nearing full capacity. Letting vROps do the heavy lifting, it found that this aggregate is in desperate need of additional storage. How much more though? Luckily, vRealize Operations helps us with that too!
Looking closer at the details in the Capacity Remaining badge, we can see that this Aggregate has a total of 743.7 GB of space (1). vRealize Operations uses the peak value (2) to determine the capacity remaining. Because this Aggregate was nearly maxed out, the capacity remaining is zero percent. Based on the policies in vROps, it is recommended we increase to 962.52 GB to avoid running out of storage in the future (3), for a total net-new capacity of ~220 GB.
Expanding the Aggregate Capacity row reveals the last 30 days of capacity remaining information (4), including what the average demand has been and what the recommended size is based on changes in demand.
How much storage can I reclaim?
Overprovisioning storage can be costly, especially when that storage could be used for other projects that are waiting on resources. In this scenario, let’s look at a VMAX Array to see how much disk space we can reclaim.
Looking at the Reclaimable Capacity Badge for the VMAX Array, we can see that we have over 12 TB that can be reclaimed (1), or nearly 50 percent of the entire Array (2). Scrolling down we can see a breakdown of the VMAX volume counts that are idle or overprovisioned (3).
Using the filter (4) to only display idle volumes, we get a detailed list of the VMAX Volumes (5) and their current disk usage. Clicking on any of the volumes will bring up the Reclaimable Capacity badge for just that volume.
For instance, by clicking on Volume 00237, you get the following information:
As you can see, this volume was setup with nearly 90 GB of storage but has not been used at all – meaning that it is 100 percent reclaimable.
Wrapping Up
Using a tool like vRealize Operations and adding Blue Medora Management Packs can provide a tremendous amount of value to your existing (and future) storage investments. In the first scenario, I demonstrated how much storage you would need to add, or purchase, to a NetApp Aggregate to avoid capacity problems. In the second scenario, we were able to reclaim nearly 12 TB of storage from a VMAX Array to use for other projects (and thus avoid an unnecessary storage purchase).
Interested in seeing how Blue Medora’s Management Packs can work for you? Try a free trial today.
