Capacity Planning for Hyper-V. Using Sumerian Capacity Planner

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1 Capacity Planning for Hyper-V Using Sumerian Capacity Planner

2 Sumerian Capacity Planner and Hyper-V Sumerian, market leader in predictive capacity planning, offers the only SaaS product on the market today to truly deliver against ITIL Capacity Management objectives. Objectives such as pre-empting capacity issues, modeling future hardware plans and capacity requirements based on hardware consumption as well as capacity. What s more if you are a Hyper-V user Sumerian Capacity Planner can use data readily available via Systems Center Virtual Machine Manger (SCVMM) or from performance counters (PerfMon) and implements Hyper-V best practice in terms of headroom and capacity configuration. If you have hardware transformation plans, or if you simply want to improve your IT capacity planning working practices, then read on. Extend your planning horizon While there are numerous 3rd party tools and management packs available for users of Systems Center Virtual Machine Manger (SCVMM) that provide insight and guidance into making the most of your infrastructure as it is today, Sumerian Capacity Planner takes that further providing a powerful scenario modeling capability that lets you plan with confidence weeks and months ahead. To get the assurance that you can accommodate demands that far ahead, it s not enough to extrapolate existing trends, optimize the use of existing resources, or model changes in individual VMs and hosts. Trends will change, resources will be added and removed, and complex changes will arrive in the form of impacts from multiple projects affecting multiple components, applications and datacenters. With Sumerian Capacity Planner, you can accurately simulate many different futures different growth scenarios, different hardware platforms, and even different datacenters and cloud solutions, immediately assessing their impact. In short, you can now prepare infrastructure options and recommendations for all eventualities. Complexities such as datacenter consolidations, physical to virtual migrations, outsourcing, hardware refresh and re-virtualization can all be modeled in minutes. Headroom for growth based on real resource consumption data Virtualization, private cloud, the Software-Defined Data Center agility has always been a major selling point wherever you are on this journey. Your business expects capacity on demand, but you know capacity is limited by your ability to safely share the underlying physical resources amongst competing workloads. So, you need to continually understand your ability to accommodate growth and how headroom varies depending on the different workloads that might be thrown at you. Page 1 of 4

3 With Sumerian Capacity Planner, you can create Workload Templates based on the real resource consumption of existing VMs computed based on a historical analysis of their actual behavior. And then predict, with a single click, the number of those workloads you can accommodate on each host, cluster and datacenter. You can then use those same templates to accurately model and plan growth scenarios based on the projects that you know are coming, and when you think they will arrive. Simulate DR You can also simulate disaster recovery situations. A hardware failure, storage failure or indeed a datacenter failure. You can now ensure that headroom reserves are sufficient to support VMs on a failover from another part of the estate and establish which VMs can and cannot be recovered. This is just what you need to satisfy your business continuity auditor that you have sufficient capacity in reserve, or perhaps provide the quantified evidence to justify a new hardware investment. Pre-empt capacity issues Using sophisticated machine learning and pattern recognition techniques, Sumerian Capacity Planner will extrapolate utilization data from vcenter and forecast when server and storage capacity issues will occur. Time series charts give a detailed view of the underlying data and forecast utilization profile, and provide a confidence level in that forecast. This gives you days, weeks or even months of advance notice letting you actively prepare mitigating actions rather than rely on urgent and often disruptive incident response. A single view of your Hyper-V estate, and beyond Create a Baseline model of hardware capacity and consumption using readily available metrics supplied directly from SCVMM or standalone Hyper-V host systems using PerfMon, where SCVMM would complement this data for additional metrics. We present this model via a single interactive Sunburst visualization, providing a clear picture of the capacity and consumption across your Hyper-V estate. And because we also have plug-ins for physical servers, other hypervisors and cloud services, you can gain a complete perspective across your entire estate, not just the Hyper-V component. Optimize your existing estate Sumerian Capacity Planner determines available headroom for further VMs using reservations based on best practice, such as recommended maximum vcpu:pcpu ratios, reserve memory, CPU headroom and storage. Using these guidelines and recommendations, Sumerian Capacity Planner can be used Page 2 of 4

4 to identify those Hyper-V hosts and Storage Spaces that are running close to capacity, and clearly show the servers most affected by predicted capacity issues. Also, by reporting on low demand, the user can reduce VM sprawl and avoid hardware over investment by identifying idle or overprovisioned VMs and those servers that can accommodate further VM instances. Business-focused views and reporting Using meta-data discovered from SCVMM (Virtual Machine Manger database) or Hyper-V WMI/performance counters, the Sunburst can be configured in numerous ways, showing, for example, per application, line of business or service views of the IT estate. With each view, the headroom for growth calculations can be configured to consider typical demand from VMs in that part of the IT estate, giving a more accurate view of the IT server, storage demand and headroom. Service and business-facing capacity reporting based on these views can then be easily generated and exported to share within the organization. Providing the quantified evidence you need to support any business case for consolidation or right sizing of the IT estate. PRO is not a substitute for capacity planning At Sumerian, we understand that VMs move around as part of your daily operations, and by using the Performance Resource Optimization capability within the Virtual Machine Manager pack for load balancing, Systems Center Virtual Machine Manger (SCVMM) will dynamically manage the placement of VMs within a host cluster to optimize the use of your currently available capacity. However, using Sumerian Capacity Planner, you can model the impact of adding new VMs and workloads. This will enable you to accurately predict the server and storage capacity required to ensure growth demands can be met, whilst ensuring a stable operating environment. Rapid setup Sumerian Capacity Planner can be setup in a number of days. How? As a SaaS offering, that takes data from SCVMM/Hyper-V, using Windows PowerShell. If SCVMM is installed, our consultants will work with you to extract relevant metrics from Virtual Machine Manager and upload into Sumerian Capacity Planner. Once your data is uploaded and Baseline model generated, you will be able to instantly view any potential capacity issues for action and start modeling your future options straight away. Page 3 of 4

5 More information To find out more about Sumerian Capacity Planner, just give us a call on , drop an to sarah@sumerian.com or visit our website at