Castle has been involved in more Capacity Planning exercises throughout the UK than any other Scottish company. The methodology involved in undertaking the Capacity Planner exercise involves the use of a Capacity Planner Tool from VMware and the expertise and experience of our highly qualified and fully accredited Technical Consultants to interpret the results.
The Castle team installs the Capacity Planner tool to a single location. Typically, over a 30 day period, the tool collects information from the physical server estate and collates it into a versatile set of data, ready for analysis. Specifically, the Capacity Planner tool is looking at utilisation of the server resources over the period. The information provided is compared to industry benchmarks and our consultants then model simulations to provide information to answer questions such as:
- How can your existing server estate be best utilised in a virtualisation deployment?
- How many virtual servers are required?
- What physical server estate is required to fulfil the objectives of the project and future requirements?
The Capacity Planner Tool consists of the following:
The Data Collector
Installed locally and gathers key performance metrics for capacity utilisation analysis
The Data Manager
This element of the tool manages the data collection and provides an organised view of the information. It also anonymises all data for secure transmission to the Information Warehouse.
The Information Warehouse
This is a central hosted data warehouse where Castle’s consultants prepare the data for analysis and undertake benchmarking, scenario modelling and set utilisation thresholds.
The Data Analyser
This component comprises advanced algorithms to resolve Capacity planning optimisation. It supports analysis capabilities such as aggregations, trending and what-if analysis; directed by Castle’s Virtualisation experts.
Health Warning
Not all Capacity Planning exercises are the same. There have been numerous occasions when Castle have been called-in to review and in many cases re-do Capacity Planning exercises which haven’t been undertaken correctly.
A proper Capacity Planning assessment is fundamental to a successful implantation of virtualisation. If you are in any doubt whatsoever, please speak to us and we’ll provide you with an honest informed opinion.
To find out more about Capacity Planning, download our overview document here. To understand the pre-requisites for a successful Capacity Planning exercise, download our pre-requisites document here.
Further Information
To find out more about these and other Virtualisation products & services, please call Castle and ask for our Technical Sales team on 0845 230 1314. Alternatively you can email us your questions to info@castle-cs.com
