VMware vCenter CapacityIQ

Overview:

VMware vCenter™ CapacityIQ, a component of the VMware vCenter family of management solutions, provides capacity management for virtualized datacenter or desktop environments. It integrates seamlessly with VMware vCenter Server to enable capacity modeling, insight and intelligence, reducing risk and enabling informed decision-making.

Benefits

• Guarantee the efficiency and predictability of virtual infrastructure capacity.
• Right-size virtual infrastructure capacity at any level – from the virtual machine to the cluster, to the entire datacenter.
• Utilize capacity efficiently.
• Make informed planning, purchasing and provisioning decisions.
• Eliminate costly waste and risk in datacenter or desktop infrastructure.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is a value-add component of the VMware vCenter family of management solutions, providing capacity management capabilities for virtualized datacenter or desktop environments. CapacityIQ integrates seamlessly with VMware vCenter Server, ensuring that your virtualized infrastructure capacity is always predictable and efficiently used. 

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ balances business demand with IT supply, without compromising performance, availability and security. With CapacityIQ, your IT infrastructure is guaranteed to have sufficient capacity to meet any business service level agreements.

IT organizations can leverage VMware vCenter CapacityIQ in a number of scenarios, including:

• Cost avoidance and justification. Do more with the same or less! Optimize utilization of existing hardware resources or justify any new business purchases.
• Availability and risk mitigation. Plan for potential business and service disruptions proactively by modeling the impact of an outage, failure or disaster.
• Project planning and decision-making. Model the effect of one-time strategic business changes. Quantify the results of workload consolidations, company acquisitions, additional new headcounts or deployment of multi-tiered applications.

Perform “What-If” Impact Analysis to Model Effect of Capacity Changes

Respond quickly to changing market and business requirements by simulating one-time, real-world use cases. Whether your company is acquiring or consolidating businesses, adding new headcount, or deploying multi-tiered applications.

CapacityIQ allows you to model various scenarios to understand and quantify the true business impact. With the right capacity intelligence, you can make informed purchasing, provisioning and planning decisions.

Identify and Reclaim Inefficient, Unused Capacity

Managing or monitoring your VM or workload requires a lot time, resources and discipline— a very tedious and consuming task. As a result, your datacenter environment may not be fully optimized.

With CapacityIQ, you can easily and quickly identify any idle or inactive VMs in your datacenter. By right-sizing or decommissioning these VMs,you can safely free up any unused capacity in order to eliminate waste and reduce costs in your organization.

Forecast Timing of Capacity Shortfalls and Bottlenecks

Your job is to deliver the right capacity at the right time—whenever and however it is needed. In a dynamic environment, this can be very difficult without the right tools.

CapacityIQ continuously profiles, analyzes and tracks your capacity needs at multiple levels: VM, host, cluster and datacenter. Based on historical capacity consumption patterns, CapacityIQ can trend and forecast your current and future capacity needs, ensuring that capacity is always available to meet any service level agreement.

Using VMware vCenter CapacityIQ:

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables IT administrators to analyze, forecast and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter or desktop environments. VMware vCenter CapacityIQ ensures that IT infrastructure capacity is used in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. In simple economic terms, CapacityIQ balances business demand with IT supply, without compromising performance, availability and security.

CapacityIQ provides complete visibility into past, present and future infrastructure capacity states—including what capacity is available, what is being used, what is needed, and when capacity will run out.

CapacityIQ eliminates infrastructure waste by identifying any unused, over-allocated or spare capacity, and reduces excessive operational overhead by automating routine capacity monitoring and management tasks. Administrators can leverage CapacityIQ to minimize the business risk of outages and failures by ensuring always available, always optimized capacity.

IT organizations can leverage VMware vCenter CapacityIQ in a number of scenarios, including:

• Cost avoidance and justification. Optimize utilization of existing hardware resources or justify any new business purchases.
• Availability and risk mitigation. Plan for potential business and service disruptions proactively by modeling the impact of an outage, failure or disaster.
• Project planning and decision-making. Model the effect of one-time strategic business changes. Quantify the results of workload consolidations, company acquisitions, additional new headcounts or deployment of multi-tiered applications.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ provides visibility into available capacity, enables the efficient usage of existing capacity, and predicts future capacity needs. CapacityIQ provides continuous and real-time intelligence into datacenter and desktop infrastructure.

How Does VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Work?

VMware virtualization enables a shared, dynamic environment— with pools of resources and capacity that can shrink or expand on demand. This constantly changing environment provides an opportunity for better, more effective capacity management. VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is a purpose-built tool to provide automated, continuous capacity intelligence that enables empower informed decision-making.

Administrators install CapacityIQ as a virtual appliance. Since virtual appliances are pre-configured, deploying CapacityIQ is simple, reducing unnecessary time and expenses. Then, administrators can access CapacityIQ from the VMware vCenter Server and review the dashboard to get an at-aglance view of past, present and future capacity needs and availability. What-if scenario wizards help to model one-time potential impacts to the datacenter or desktop infrastructure capacity. Administrators can print and export real-time capacity reports to send to management or IT staff.

Key Features of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ:

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ provides the following key features for just-in-time capacity planning:

Capacity Awareness

• Dashboard with at-a-glance charts and graphs: View and analyze past, present, and future capacity states. Leverage the dashboard to quickly review dynamic capacity demands and ensure real-time tuning.
• Customized capacity thresholds and alerts: Turn datacenter capacity on auto-pilot by specifying rules, settings and alerts. Eliminate any timely and costly routine monitoring and management tasks through automation.

Capacity Optimization

• Detailed reports with recommendations: Reclaim excess capacity from idle, oversized or poweredoff virtual machines. Each capacity report provides detailed supporting data to help with any right-sizing or decommissioning decisions.
• Smart capacity profiler and advisor: Size and allocate capacity for each virtual machine based on historical and future needs. Place and stack virtual machines in the most optimal clusters to eliminate further waste.

Capacity Prediction

• Interactive What-If modeling scenarios: Simulate one-time business events to derive the best-fit outcome. Input company-, situation-, or project-specific data points to quantify potential business impact.\
• Contextual capacity forecasts: Identify the exact timing of potential capacity shortfalls based on business-as-usual trends and predictions—specific to the datacenter or desktop environments. Purchase and provision capacity as and when needed.

Documentation:

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ Data Sheet (.PDF)