Dell published a new tool which aims at simplifying the capacity planning and purchase process for those customers embracing virtualization: the VMware ESX Server Virtualization Advisor.
The tool asks several questions about which kind of goal a customers is trying to achieve with virtualization but it fails miserably where it should help the most: providing guidance.
The complexity of questions a customer has to answer implies a full and solid understanding of hardware virtualization technologies, along with remarkable experience to recognize subtle differences between certain options. But as soon as a customer already has such skills the Dell advisor becomes useless.
It’s a pity that the information gathering phase is so complex because the overall platform is a step in the right direction: it provides a list of servers and storage to buy, each one with a detailed configuration, along with a basic diagram to interconnect them.
Capacity planning remains one of the biggest challenge in virtualization adoption. Dell has to do much more than that to automate the process.
