Friday, 5 August 2016

Windows Server Capacity Management 101 - What is Capacity management? (1 of 12)


What is Capacity management?


The ITIL definition of capacity management is:

“Capacity management is responsible for ensuring that adequate
capacity is available at all times to meet the agreed needs of the business in a cost-effective manner..”
(ITIL Capacity Management, 2016)

The important words in this quote are adequate, all times, needs and cost effective.

Capacity management is simply making sure you have the capacity for the business at all times, without it costing a fortune. Carrying out Capacity Management in a cost-effective manner is very important as it’s very easy to do capacity management with an unlimited budget, for those that don’t budget planning, monitoring and reporting needs to be done to ensure that the processes are as efficient and cost effective as possible.
So now we have a good idea of what capacity management is, let’s look at our next question.  


Why are so little of the resources used in Windows environments?


Historically Windows systems weren’t as reliable as they are today, for instance windows 2003, which had a reliability rating of 98.54. Now that might sound like a lot but it means that over the course of a year the server was down for 12.8 hours and that is not acceptable when dealing with critical systems.

This has led to: 

·      Windows systems on average ~5% CPU busy 

·      Over-specification of hardware “to avoid performance problems”

As time has gone on Windows have improved their reliability but the people managing those systems are still reluctant to really push the servers because of previous bad experiences. 


·      “MINE!” Reluctance to share resources

·      Each Windows machine running only one function e.g. firewall, file server, database


People have got used to the idea of having their own windows systems for their own section of work and have been slow in adopting a more resource sharing attitude - this means that each server is doing very little.

On Monday I'll be asking whether the move to virtualization technology has corrected this issue.

In the meantime sign up for our Community and get access to some great Capacity Management Resources like white papers and on-demand webinars.
http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/login.asp

Josh Worth
Consultant

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