vCapacity

vCapacity Planning

vCapacity offers comprehensive capacity planning and performance analytics that enable customers to analyze, forecast and plan for efficient resource utilization to optimize performance within the virtualized data center or private cloud environment. vCapacity, when combined with the other modules of the Virtualization Management Center (VMC), delivers granular trending, alerting, and reporting functionality in the context of a single, integrated virtualization management suite.

From a single dashboard, users can garner a holistic view of their environment, and drill down into such details as CPU, memory and data store usage, resources, and utilization rates over time. From within the same product, these users can then make adjustments to resources, based on real-time data from a single source of truth, not infrequent batch information that may be old or out of sync with the existing environment.

vCapacity Planning allows enterprises to:

• Improve both CAPEX and OPEX efficiency by increasing VM density while maintaining application performance
• Gain granular insight and control over planning and forecasting to predict resource allocation and reclamation
• Understand capacity and performance in context of the entire infrastructure due to the tight integration with broader virtualization management capabilities
• Maintain data fidelity over time to ensure more accuracy and better decision-making ability as users plan and continue to expand virtualized infrastructure

vCapacity Key Features

• Performance Analysis — vCapacity enables users to detect bottlenecks inside the virtual infrastructure, identify under-provisioned VMs, performance issues of critical applications, and outages allowing administrators to improve the service level for applications and quickly troubleshoot issues.
• Capacity Planning — Capacity and performance analytics are provided in context of the entire virtualized data center federated across multiple vCenters. This provides the ability to analyze, forecast and plan resource utilization, efficiency and monitor performance from a holistic perspective.
• Rightsizing and Remediation — From the same console, customers can view recommendations for proper VM sizing across CPU, memory and storage, and then actually implement changes. They can view snapshots of capacity usage over time, including future forecasting based on prior performance. Through accurate rightsizing and reclamation, users have the ability to maximize capacity while maintaining performance.
• Monitoring & Management Capabilities — More accurate, actionable data empowers users to monitor what is happening at a very detailed level, but Reflex also provides the capability to “do” something about it within the same product. Monitoring and alerting certainly provides the information about an issue, but the ability to perform management tasks allows the user to take appropriate actions in the context of when the issue occurred, why the issue occurred, and what other systems were affected.
• Showback — vCapacity presents the average monthly cost and monthly savings of resources that are being used throughout the virtualized environment. This helps IT administrators manage cost of workloads in the virtual infrastructure and IT budgets to plan for the appropriate resource utilization.
• Web-based Dashboards — Reflex provides a high-level summary dashboard as well as granular targeted dashboards highlighting capacity, contention, latency, inventory, allocation, availability and efficiency. Providing easy-to-use and highly readable interface, vCapacity allows administrators to quickly visualize capacity planning issues, such as:
  • Resources (CPU, memory & storage) that are being wasted
  • Where resource contention is highest across the entire environment and within clusters
  • Physical resource overcommitment usage and trends
  • Which VMs are consuming the most resources within a given cluster
  • Capacity usage across time, including future forecasting based on prior performance over an extended period of time
• Reporting — vCapacity provides both analytic and executive summary reporting. Users can customize reports with both graphical and text views, set up scheduled reports, and publish via email or other web dashboards.
• Integration — As a single source of truth for all virtual infrastructure analysis, Reflex provides comprehensive context and more intelligence. Access to data stored in the VMC is backed by rich APIs that enable data export and integration with other management systems.
• Comprehensive Historical Data — Historical information about the overall virtual infrastructure enables users to analyze past, present, and future capacity states. Integration of capacity and performance analytics into broader management functionality provides insight into other management domains that may be contributing to performance or capacity issues. Reflex can store low level, high fidelity, real-time, historical performance/capacity and configuration data for long periods of time – federated across all VMware vCenters in the enterprise.
• Scale — vCapacity leverages complex event processing (CEP) technology to enable real-time, high-speed computations needed by the dynamic virtualization environments rather than the typical inefficient batch roll ups. This allows organizations to easily scale as the environment grows and still get accurate performance and capacity analytics in real-time without having to wait hours for some systems to “batch” only to learn there was a major impact on critical applications hours ago.