How do we properly capacity manage a Windows environment? - Windows Server Capacity Management 101 (3 of 12)

In order to effectively capacity manage we need to:

·       Capture/monitor appropriate metrics

·        Trend

·       Model

·       Balance service against cost

The first step to properly capacity managing a windows environment is to properly implement Capacity management and it’s important to plan out how you are going to do it.

You'll start with collecting performance data on the windows environment you want to manage and if need be the host machine if they are running under a hypervisor like VMware or Hyper-V , then using this data to create charts and trends.

It’s important to:

·       Capture the right metrics.

·       Pick the right capture interval.

·       Select when to capture data.

·       Remember that some metrics don’t give the complete picture.

To be able to properly capacity manage, you need data but it's important to capture the right data.  This means planning what metrics to capture and at what interval.

15 minute intervals of data is a good starting point, but the correct interval length is highly dependent on the type of workload and how you are reporting.

It's also important to consider when you want to capture data, capturing data 24 hours a day will make day averages much lower than if you only report on your peak hours.

This is the same for days, if you do most of your work Monday to Friday then Saturday and Sunday will make the averages lower.  These are considerations you need to take in to account when you are collecting data. 

It’s also important to understand that the more frequently you collect data the more data that is going to produce, this may sound obvious but capturing data at 2 minutes 24/7 will produce a large amount of data very quickly.

Once you are collecting data at the right time and interval, you want to start reporting and trending that data.

Not all metrics give a true picture of hardware, an example of this is CPU reported busy. Windows will report higher utilization than is true because it’s not aware that VMware will swap in and out the logical CPU, it will just report it was busy the whole time.

On Friday I'll take a look at Trending.

Josh Worth

Consultant