Tool to measure physical performance of P2V candidates

[Typoman]

I may be undertaking a project to overhaul a small datacenter using VI3. I talked to a friend that runs a fairly large datacenter. He said there is a tool to run on the physical servers that I am thinking of vitualizing. The tool would collect a bunch of performance data and make a recommendation about whether or not that server is a good candidate for virtualization. Does this ring a bell with anyone?

[daniel_uk]

Hi,

You have plenty of options;

Perform yourself with a products such as Platespin Power Recon, MOM, Zenoss (open source) or even perfmon

OR

If you are planning a big migration use VMware capacity planning services from either Vmware or a special partner, this is a good rubber stamp for ensuring you have a third party audit.

Thanks

Dan

[DougBaer]

Daniel is correct that CapacityPlanner is a tool used by VMware and some partners to perform virtualization assessments. I work for one of these partners and have used the tool quite a bit: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization_assessment.pdf

If you are interested in doing it yourself, there are other tools like the one from CiRBA: http://www.cirba.com/ -- they claim to be better than VMware's CP, but I haven't had any experience with them.

Ultimately, the data should be used more for general planning purposes than strict, "do exactly what the tool says," doctrine.

[Safesys]

Is Capacity Planner a hosted service only? Or is is software you can run from your own server?

[DougBaer]

As for CapacityPlanner, it is hosted only. The collector software runs on a local machine, but it sends the data to VMware's data warehouse for aggregation, analysis, and comparison with other systems. There is quite a bit of analysis that can be performed, but it often amounts to information overload.

I believe the CiRBA tool handles everything locally.