VMware tries its hand at capacity planning
VMware released CapacityIQ 1.0 for VMware ESX 3.x to rid waste and right-size environments
Follow @infoworldMuch 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.
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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?
