The changing face of Capacity Management - Private Clouds (4 of 4)

With a private cloud, a key output of any capacity management process must be information to the internal customers.  In order to get this information, capacity and performance data must be captured and stored.

As an example, let's consider a VMware vSphere implementation that was put in place to replace an organization's Windows and Linux estate.

First of all, this data must be at the right granularity and at the right levels -- as I mentioned earlier, it's not enough to know what's happening inside the virtual machine or even just within the service itself.

Important data includes availability information, utilizations and allocations, service level agreements (how often are they violated) and financial data (costs, charges, and pricing) as well.

On top of data that's specific to that group, it's probably a good idea with a private cloud to include some "macro" level data.  How much overall capacity is there within the private cloud?  What are the overall utilizations?  How much available capacity is there in the entire environment?

Again, it's easy to over-allocate or under-allocate by a small amount for each internal group or application, but it's just as important to show the "overall" view because it is incredibly costly to an organization if the overall environment is over-built (too much money spent on hardware, software, etc.) or under-built (lost business, unhappy customers).

So it stands to reason that any capacity management solution for a private cloud should capture data from a VMware environment at the datacenter, cluster, resource pool, host, and VM level. Provide you with data capture at a very granular level and have the ability to roll up into multiple levels of summaries over time.  

It’s important to be able to incorporate business statistics, financial and costing information in to the database.

Reports and alerts (performance and trending) including these types of data help you to communicate effectively with your internal customers and your organization's management, in terms they understand.

It will come as no surprise that we have expertise in producing and implementing capacity management processes or that athene®, along with our capture packs, provides everything you need to successfully capacity manage your cloud environment.

Visit our website www.metron-athene.com

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer