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brian
Asked: 2011-04-29 17:44:30 +0800 CST

Automatic VM capacity planning

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Situation:

I've got a bunch of blades, all with same amount of memory and cores in each. Some have local storage, some do not and rely on the SAN.

I've also got a ton of VMs that I need to build and drop on these blades. There are about 7 or 8 different instance types, each which has the same spec. For example, instanceA has 2 GB RAM/2 cores/100 GB SAN storage. InstanceB has 4 GB RAM/8 cores/60 GB blade-local storage. InstanceC has 16GB RAM/4 cores/100 GB blade-local storage. Etc.

Is there some sort of tool somewhere that I can run/get/etc that I can punch in each blade and instance spec, and said tool will automatically propose which blades to put instances on, while leaving a bit of room for overhead? Even an Excel template or something would work.

List of VMs and hosts goes in, locations of VMs on guests comes out. VMware with vSphere.

Any input is appreciated

virtual-machines capacity-planning blade-server

2 Answers

  1. vmware Capacity Planner would fit your needs. Once installed on your network it collects configuration and performance of your running servers over a time periods (say 30 days) in order to produce some reports that will show you how you can fit your servers into your hardware (this tool let you to insert your hardware configuration in terms of CPU/CORES/MHZ/RAM/DISK IOPS).

    Data will be sent to wmware to produce these reports. You will be able to logon to this site in order to analize collected data: https://optimize.vmware.com/index.cfm

    Please note that the tool is not available immediately, but if I remember you will need to attend to some training on vmware to gain access to it.

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  2. Adaptive Computing's Moab Suite may fit the bill as a scheduling and placement-enabling tool.

    While it does not handle provisioning on its own, it can easily integrate with a variety of other tools that can handle that for you, and it can keep track of your currently-used and -available assets.

    Disclosure: while I am not an employee, my employer is a partner of Adaptive, and I am a ProServe engineer with the product.

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