One the primary goals for IT is usually better efficiency, which tends to be a contestant obstacle as new and larger technologies are released. VMware and virtual machines is no exception to this challenge. VMware does make a tool that is pretty helpful when it comes to managing and planning your capacity needs. Capacity IQ uses the following tools to help predict what physical resources will be necessary to run a virtual machine within your performance SLA’s:

• Physical Capacity-CPU, memory, disk space, I/O, etc…
• Virtual Machine Capacity- Measurement of abstract capacity. Basically converting physical properties into virtual machine measurements.
• Past through Present Trends- Tracks speed of capacity and gives insight of where and how fast it is increasing, decreasing or staying stagnate.
• Estimated Time Remaining- This helps with planning for future upgrades and refreshes.

Once you have gone through the program and looked at the different dashboards you should be able to go through an extensive amount of information. You can now turn that data and optimize your host for capacity regaining unused resources. To do this select the Views tab, select Virtual Machine Optimization – Summary.

And you should see something below:

Which will give you the following:

• Assess Virtual Machine Capacity usage.
• Identify Oversized Virtual Machines.
• Identify Undersized Virtual Machines.
• Discover Idle Virtual Machines.
• Discover Powered-off Virtual Machines.

You can also use a helpful tool that will allow the creation of scenarios. These “what-if” scenarios would show how capacity could change based on certain conditional changes without making actual changes to your virtual infrastructure. This is really helpful for when you want to know what deploying an application would do to your environment in advance versus just throwing it in your environment and hoping for the best.

Price:

MSRP is $495.00 per processor and you licenese it based off of vCenter servers.

Summary:

Mananging capacity can be one of the most difficult parts of managing and infrastructure. Getting the most of what you have and knowing when to upgrade or expand can feel a lot like playing the stock market. CapIQ can help resolve most of these issues.

More Information.