VMware tries its hand at capacity planning

Much was made about VMware expanding its management product portfolio back during VMworld 2008 as the company hinted around an entire new series of vCenter products and modules in the coming months and following year. Much to the chagrin of many of its partners at that time, it was obvious that many of these products and modules would be directly competing with them for the same customer dollars.

Fast-forward to this week, and VMware finally announced its initial attempt to productize and answer the capacity-planning question that many of its consumers have been asking. VMware released a 1.0 version called VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, making good on its promise to bring this technology to market during the current calendar year.

[ Lanamark looks beyond server virtualization analysis and capacity planning by extending its software to reach out to the desktop | Keep up with the latest virtualization news with InfoWorld’s virtualization newsletter and visit the InfoWorld Virtualization Topic Center for news, blogs, essentials, and information about InfoWorld virtualization events. ]

A value-add component of the VMware vCenter family of management solutions, CapacityIQ provides (as its name suggests) capacity management capabilities for virtualized datacenters or desktop environments. VMware said that CapacityIQ provides administrators with visibility into past, present, and future infrastructure capacity so that they can analyze what is available and what is being used, forecast what is needed, and plan when capacity will run out. As a result, administrators can eliminate waste, reduce overhead, and minimize risks.

Andi Mann, VP of research for independent IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), said that capacity-planning tools are essential for any virtualization deployment, adding “With VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, VMware is delivering a key solution for one of the most impactful areas of virtual systems management.”

Mann also said that EMA research shows that this discipline contributes to higher VM densities, higher admin efficiency, better application performance, and more best-practice outcomes.

No doubt, this technology is a necessary part of the virtual environment, but the question raised in my mind back at VMworld 2008 still rings true today: How will CapacityIQ and other VMware products like it go over with existing VMware partners offering competing technology?

Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel, a VMware partner, seems to agree with the importance of capacity-planning tools. In fact, when I spoke with Bakman, he said he would like to thank VMware for validating the market need for capacity planning, management, and optimization.

But he added, “In looking at CapacityIQ, it does a good job of capacity modeling and planning. However, where it falls short is in bottleneck identification (current and future), right-sizing, and waste finding. IT admins do not have a lot of time to figure this stuff out before problems arise. They need instant answers to solve these issues to continually improve performance and optimize their VMware environments.”

VKernel has been developing its solutions for two years now, and unlike VMware’s 1.0 product, Bakman believes that VKernel’s solutions provide the detailed answers that are needed and missing in VMware’s product.

“CapacityIQ may be good enough for some,” said Bakman, “but our Capacity Analyzer and Optimization Pack provides many more features and functionality and delivers our users the answers and actionable information to make them successful in managing and optimizing their environments.”

The other curious thing to note about VMware’s CapacityIQ release is that it doesn’t currently work with VMware vSphere, the platform that VMware is pushing existing and new users toward. Instead, the 1.0 product is only available for VMware ESX 3.x and vCenter 2.5 environments, which could cause confusion with those administrators in the process of upgrading. However, the wait may not be long. VMware did say its expects the product to support vSphere before the end of the year.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is now available, and pricing starts at $1,204 for a single CPU and one year of gold support.

This story, “VMware tries its hand at capacity planning,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization on InfoWorld.com.