Friday, 15 February 2013

Capacity Management: Guided Practitioner Satnav - When will I get there? (12 of 17)

When will I get there? This year, next year, sometime, never?

SatNav gives a typical answer in hours and minutes but your detailed time depends on the route selected and the options taken and the answer will be based on accumulated experience gathered over many journeys.
When faced with a vague question like ‘When will I get there?’, the best option is to try to break it down into something that can be more readily answered.  Perhaps you can break it down into short term, medium term and long term.  The precise duration in terms of months and years is likely to be influenced by the local culture and appetite for change.

After a typical ‘gap analysis’ consultancy, the main deliverable is often perceived to be a checklist of objectives expressed in these sorts of terms.
The example that follows is one such.  It is based on the status of capacity management within the Wintel virtual infrastructure (VI) farm at a large enterprise



Assets: The attributes in the VI candidate spread sheet need to be reviewed in the light of the emerging classification as proposed in this report.  The current entries have been derived from a number of sources in a variety of asset registers and ideally would be standardised to reflect required actions. 
ESM: Currently there is a wide range of metrics captured and certainly a sufficient wealth of information to provision an informed capacity management process.  The current issue is the disconnection between the ESM team and the infrastructure teams.  The work undertaken by the ESM team has ensured that all key system level metrics are available and can be reported on.  The cultural issue means that people either aren’t aware of this availability or haven’t perceived a requirement for this data.
Metrics: There are many metrics available from Virtual Center which if imported correctly should provide an adequate range of VI capacity reporting opportunities.  The VM metrics required include any classifications agreed such as resource capping, priority, backup, and other potential categories such as gold/silver/bronze services or small/medium/large resources.  The current KPIs are covered in the ESM, but need to be extended to add CPU utilisation/servers, % reduction in response time, % reduction in physical estate and % reduction in software licence costs.
Reports: A large number of explicit new reports and associated interpretation activities are proposed.
The categorization process is something that I’ll deal with next time………
Adam Grummitt
Distinguished Engineer




No comments:

Post a Comment