Virtual Machine (VM) Capacity Planning and Management Tool

Virtualization capacity planning refers to the processes and best practices used for designing, testing, and optimizing how an organization’s hardware and software are used to create and maintain virtual workstations and environments.

A virtualization capacity planning strategy works by using VM resource insights to identify what workloads can be optimized to make the existing virtual environment more efficient. VM capacity planning can also help organizations plan for future workloads more easily by using VM insights and modeling to make informed recommendations about whether current virtualization resources would be sufficient if more end users were added, hardware failed, and the potential resource additions needed to scale to meet future workload requirements.

When predicting resources with VM capacity planning, it’s important to have a solid grasp on all the different factors and elements in play to ensure adequate application and server resources for an organization.

Virtualization capacity planning is important because if an application or server lacks resources or becomes overloaded, it can cause disruptions across an entire company. If an organization anticipates or finds itself experiencing a period of substantial growth or expansion, virtualization capacity planning is an essential part of ensuring storage resources continue to meet the workload requirements for end users to perform their jobs and applications receiving high or constant use can function without interruption.

VM and Hyper-V capacity planning tools are designed to help streamline the process of virtualization capacity planning by providing administrators with the information required to make informed decisions about VM resources. VM capacity planning tools can gather data from the various physical and virtual devices within an environment to determine technical requirements, while also managing the infrastructure of virtual devices to help ensure optimal virtual machine performance management. 

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager offers features to support the VM capacity planning process. By monitoring machine performance, the software is designed to allow you to predict CPU usage, as well as the memory and storage needs for virtual devices and servers—for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Azure, and AWS environments. 

Virtualization Manager allows you to design and run different potential virtual modeling scenarios, so you can see how future configurations might run on the current technical specifications and resources. This can also indicate where and how resources need to expand to support those configurations. You can also use the modeling scenarios to ensure your current VM configurations are operating at optimal efficiency. 

In addition to the powerful prediction tools offered by Virtualization Manager, there are features for managing your virtual infrastructure before, during, and after capacity planning and execution. Virtualization Manager can also help you easily reclaim CPU usage and disk space by controlling VM sprawl. The easy-to-navigate dashboard provides broad visibility over the entire virtualization stack, while also giving you the ability to quickly access granular details.