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The Capacity Planning module is an intuitive module that helps you to:

  • Anticipate saturation dates.
  • Deploy new projects.
  • Simulate the loss of servers.
  • Test your Business Continuity Plan.
  • Test your Disaster Recovery Plan
  • Anticipate future needs.
  • Simulate adding or deleting VM's, servers, datastores.

Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan

When running Capacity Planning simulations, you can select what happen with the virtual machines tagged with a low, normal or high priority status in the infratructure.

Default Graphs

Business Continuity Plan : All the virtual machines from removed servers are kept.

Disaster Recovery : Only the virtual machines with the selected HA level are kept from the removed servers .

Saturation dates

One of the advantages of virtualization is the over commitment of resources: the virtual increase of the physical resources (memory, number of logical cores and disk space). For example: an infrastructure with physical RAM capacity of 100 GB can simulate a virtual RAM capacity of 200GB by overcommit the RAM resource to 200%. By default, DC Scope applies the over commitment rates of: 4 VCPU per logical core, 160% for RAM memory and 100% for Disk. For more information please refer to the Capacity Planning Settings of this guide.

The first part of the Capacity Planning module, allows to see the saturation dates of virtual and physical resources at the current state of the infrastructure.

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Resource Allocations Description
The left frame correspond to the Virtual Resources, and includes all the virtual resources in the infrastructure. The right frame corresponds to the Physical Resources, and includes all the physical resources in the infrastructure.
VRAM: the sum of VRAM memory. RAM: The sum of the consumed memories (Consumedcounter) by VMs.
VCPU: the sum of VCPUs. CPU: The sum of the MHz consumed (counter CPUMHz).
VDISK: the sum of VDisk. DISK: The difference between the total disk capacity of data stores and the total disk available (free) space on them.
The line USED list the sum of the allocations for each resource. The line USED list the sum of RAM consumed (Consumedcounter), the sum of MHz consumed in the CPU (CPUMHz counter) and the difference between the total storage capacity and the available (free) storage space on them.

The saturation dates for each resource is determined via a linear regression. A color code is used to present the dates as follows:

Color Description
Green No risk in the short term, the saturation date is more than five years
Orange The saturation date is less than five years. DC Scope will provide the month and year.
Red - KO "The resource is saturated.
Red - KO If is in the first frame «Virtual Resources», it may not be necessary to add physical servers. The increase of the overcommitment rate, the resize of oversized VMs or the deletion of idea VMs may reduce the allocations and therefore extend the saturation dates.
Red - KO If is in the second frame «Real Resources», it might be necessary to add physical resources. However, the elimination of unnecessary VMs to recover resources could help to extend the saturation dates.,Red - No data,Not available information.
Red - No data Not available information.

Simulations

Adding/deleting projects and host failure modeling – What if scenarios?

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The Simulation frame allows to simulate the deployment or deletion of VMs, Servers and/or Data stores. The addition can be done based on existing profiles (existing VMs, servers, data stores) or in new elements with personalized configurations.

By clicking in the Deploy or Delete button, a popup window will display the inventory of the current elements in the infrastructure.

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In case of the VM the information provided is: name, amount of memory, number of VCPUs allocated, disk space, average consumption of memory (MB) and processor (MHz). For physical servers the information provided is: name, RAM capacity and logical cores. For data stores the information provided is: name and storage capacity.

The line New is available in the first line of the Deploy popup for each category (VM, Servers and Data stores). The default characteristic of this new item is an average profile of an element in the infrastructure. To select an element to Deploy or Delete you have to click on the checking box located at the left of its name. The element will appear in the simulation frame either in the deployment or deletion column.

If you are adding elements, an icon with the form of a pencil, next to the number of items, will allow you to customize the elements to add.

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Once the elements to Deploy or Delete are selected, the simulation is launched by pressing the Run Simulation button. This simulation will be carried out in two stages:

  1. A placement algorithm will determine if the elements to deploy or delete can be supported by the infrastructure.
  2. If the placement of the elements is possible, DC Scope will define new saturation dates for the resources in the line.

The results of the simulation will be presented in the line Simulation, with the saturation dates for both Virtual and Physical Resources. The color codification is the same as the codification for saturation dates.

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Remember that it is possible to export the simulations carried out on the Capacity Planning by clicking on the button Export Simulation.

The VM HA Priority slider in the top of the frame allows to prioritize the placement of VM according to the parameters of High Availability in VMWare.