Capacity Planning Tool Recommendation

[mark_chuman]

Anyone have suggestions regarding a good capacity planning tool?  Aware of, and have some exposure to CapacityIQ and vKernel and have looked at vCenter Operations.  Anyone have experience with VMTurbo or SolarWinds?  Thanks

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I have experience with VMturbo, Solarwinds, vCops, and vKernel. I like them all for Capacity planning.... Part of capacity planning will be some level of Rightsizing and vCops approach is to show you rightsizing and therefore capacity information based on normalized over time workloads. Solarwinds VMAN shows me up front some things that are important to solve before I do my capacity planning. While VMTurbo does a very good job of balancing work loads across hosts and datastore out of the box.

All have good features, and all have different approaches to right sizing, so far no two tools have agreed on values but most agree that something needs to be done to certain VMs.

All these tools will show you WHEN your workloads will exceed capacity based on your normal addition and usage of resources rates. Which is very good. vCops however is the only one that is even quasi application aware, so that when you define an application you can use that definition to determin capacity and when capacity will run out based on that application (Enterprise only versions however). The other tools look purely at the underlying resources regardless of application.

I tend to run out of storage sooner than any other resource and all tools predict that pretty well. All tools predicted running out of memory as well (that is until I upgraded the memory in the machines)...

Some of these products are harder to understand than others right out of the box (at least for me). While some are easier. I personally like VMturbo's UI and their planning screens. I also like Solarwinds query language so that I can write more in depth measure over time dashboards for those metrics that I personally find important.

Good luck. You can get most of these tools as demo versions and I would suggest that.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010, 2011

Author of the books 'VMWare ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2011 Pearson Education. 'VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment', Copyright 2009 Pearson Education.
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[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

I woudl also through Cirba into the mix - some of the best analytics I have seen in handling both the pre-virtualization Capacity Plannin as well as the ongoing capacity management - 

[mark_chuman]

Thanks for the great feedback.