With the release of vRealize Operations 6.7 there are some fundamental changes to the way we look at capacity management. These came about because customers are more and more looking at real-time capacity management to deal with what is happening now. That is not to say that what we plan for in the future is less important, but customers have a strong desire to understand and answer some simple questions:
- How much capacity do I have currently?
- How many VMs can I fit in that remaining capacity?
- Based on utilization, when will I run out of capacity?
- What if I add new workloads? Where can I ‘best fit’ them?
These seem to be very easy questions to answer, but underneath them are complex algorithms that have to constantly adapt to a customer’s changing environment. Additionally, we’ve changed the UI to make it easier than ever to get answers to those questions.
Capacity looking backward
A lot of solutions on the market look at capacity as it exists from a historical standpoint to determine what capacity exists now and into the future. Immediate changes in capacity, such as freeing up resources by optimizing VMs, removing waste or adding new hosts may not immediately show an increased availability in capacity because of this historical focus.
Real-time capacity looking forward
With this in mind, a lot of effort was focused on ensuring capacity updates are available as soon as changes occur. Imagine you are in the process of reclaiming unused storage capacity. As soon as you complete the job, you can go assed capacity and immediately and see the reflected updates. No need to wait long periods of time for the historical data to catch up.
This ability to adapt automatically to capacity changes in real-time gives IT practitioners and organizations to run more on-demand capacity. But how do you plan for the future capacity? Forward-looking abilities to forecast now include confidence bands. What is a confidence band? Simply put, it is a statistical ability to show the likelihood you will reach a given level as you move into the future.
Why do you need a confidence band? Some tools on the market roll up their historical data to 1 hour or even 1 day averages. This can lead to poor decisions when trying to model future behavior. After all, an average of averages of averages can only be so accurate. Because vRealize Operations never rolls up data your historical data, you can be assured that the statistical modelling is highly accurate. This gives you the confidence you need and that you will have the capacity when you need it most.
Even still, would you really take a VM from say 16 vCPUs to 4? Are you confident you could go all the way down right away? The confidence will show that you can go to 4 with some level of confidence, but you could go to 8 with a high level of confidence. The way it then can play out is in your organization is showing the data says, “We can go to 4, but let’s meet in the middle and go to 8 confidently.”
Summary
vRealize Operations 6.7 has made some incredible improvements in capacity based on feedback from many of you who continue to challenge VMware to do better! Thank you!
Download and Try vRealize Operations here!
