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What-If Analysis with vRealize Operations 8.0

There is more to capacity management for vSphere environments than looking at what’s currently running in your clusters. Clusters are always in flux with VMs and hosts being added and removed. There can be situations that require looking at migrating workloads to other datacenters or the public cloud. If you’ve run into any of these challenges, then you’re in luck, vRealize Operations helps with all of those situations with what’s called “What-If Analysis”. I’d like to take a little time to tell you about the new features in vRealize Operations 8.0 What-If Analysis that will make your capacity planning workflow even easier.

Annual Projected Growth

The first new feature that applies to Add VM and Datacenter Compare what-if scenarios is called Annual Projected Growth. As you know, most VMs demand more resources over time, so when you’re planning for new VMs it’s nice to be able to account for that growth. Annual Projected Growth allows you to tell vRealize Operations how much you expect that VM to grow over the next year. You can enter a single percentage growth for the VM or separate percentage growth for CPU, memory, and disk space. As you can see below, by adding 20% growth, the projection over the next year reflects that 20% increase in workload.

HCI Planning

What-If analysis for HCI environments come with additional challenges because the amount of disk space required for a VM is dependent on storage policies. Storage policies let you define the number of hosts failures to tolerate, the fault tolerance method (RAID levels), and deduplication. The new Add and Remove VMs and Add and Remove HCI Nodes in vRealize Operations 8.0 now have that awareness built-in and allow you to enter the vSAN configuration when running the what-if scenario. For those of you familiar with vSAN Sizer, the vSAN Sizer code is embedded in vRealize Operations to allow it to provide accurate disk space recommendations.

This screenshot shows two what-if scenarios stacked. The first is to add vSAN nodes to the cluster and the second is to add VMs with storage policies. The stacked scenario shows the new VMs will fit (if a new host is added), and based on the projected utilization, will run out of disk space in about 140 days from now.

Datacenter Compare

When you’re looking to deploy new VMs, have you ever wondered which datacenter would be the best option from a cost perspective? Well, now you can with the new Datacenter Comparison scenario. With this scenario, you can now see how much VMs would cost running in multiple datacenters. If the system determines that the VMs won’t fit in your desired datacenter, there is a quick link to Add Workload scenario to help you dig into the details of why the VMs won’t fit.

If you want to learn more about capacity planning or cost management with vRealize Operations I have 3 sessions at VMworld next week that might be of interest to you.

  • Yes, Mr. CFO, IT Is Expensive — Understand Why with vRealize Operations [HBO1138BE]
  • It’s Not 2005 Anymore: Stop Using Excel for Capacity Management [HBO1136BE]
  • Capacity and cost optimization with vRealize Operations [MTE6044E]

A great way to learn more is to download a trial of vRealize Operations and try it in your own environment! You can find more demos and videos on vrealize.vmware.com. Be sure to stay tuned here as we will have even more blogs about vRealize Operations 8.0 coming soon.

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