Capacity planning methods need to evolve into real-time management to take on resource allocation in dynamic virtual environments, enabling IT departments to successfully grow their virtual deployments.
Capacity management challenges persist in virtual environments “Capacity planning today is all about trying to ensure that you have enough capacity and memory cycles to meet workload demand. But virtualization causes new variables to be taken into consideration, and power consumption is just one among many,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner, in a February 2009 interview. “For IT resource planning (ITRP) there are several more elements to consider and the process must become much more strategic within an enterprise.” Virtualization essentially breaks the old method of capacity planning, considering live migrations can happen on their own and without extensive input from the management staff. That means that IT managers need to update their approach to planning for capacity and actually evolve it into a real-time function within their environment, says Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing for the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit at CA Technologies (and a former industry analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.) “Capacity planning needs to be in place when you first start virtualizing servers, and most people are doing that and now coming up against real troubles. But because virtualization is fundamentally different than planning for a physical environment, IT managers must transition to doing capacity management in real time,” Mann says. A March 2010 survey commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by Forrester Consulting showed that accurately planning for resource demand and consumption represented a challenge for the majority of the nearly 260 IT professionals polled. In this study, 10% of IT pros polled ranked capacity management and planning as a top operational concern, rating it first. Eleven percent indicated that security and lacking IT skills were their biggest hurdle, and 11% also ranked capacity planning as a second concern. Some 12% said capacity planning was among their primary issues, making it overall the top operational concern for IT professionals in this survey. CA Technologies’ Mann at the time of the survey pointed to poor capacity planning practices as the reason virtual deployments have stalled in many IT organizations. The survey found that a majority of IT organizations cannot expand their virtual server deployments past an average of about 30% due to several reasons. “We are not yet getting over the hump virtual machine, or VM, stall. Several research firms have reiterated the data we found earlier this year in the Forrester/CA survey. There is a bunch of research all pointing to the same thing. This is a longitudinal problem; it is not just a point in time. Progress has flattened out over the period of the last 12 months and that makes it a stall and not simply a slow progression,” Mann says now. “It’s not enough to plan in a virtual environment, because you can’t plan when live migrations happen by themselves. You have to manage capacity in real time.” How do you plan for virtual capacity? Have you deployed new tools or are you relying on proven practices? Please leave a comment here or let me know directly via e-mail at Denise.Dubie@ca.com. Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter here.
Virtualization changes a somewhat static environment into a dynamic one in which resources are moving about with relative ease, but not always at the control of the IT managers. Industry watchers have been warning of the need for better capacity planning and ultimately capacity management processes since x86 server virtualization started to take off in enterprise IT shops.
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