virtualization.info has stressed about the importance of capacity planning for years now, but the number of vendors that are actively working to educate the market is extremely low, as low is the number of products available in this space.
Even VMware, despite its leadership position and remarkable product portfolio, didn’t spent too much effort in evangelizing capacity planning (and management).
The company has a hosted solution, Capacity Planner, available since October 2005 for its solution providers, a scaled down version of the service available as part of VI 3.5, Server Consolidation Advisor, since December 2007, and a brand new product called CapacityIQ, that was launched in October 2009.
Things seem changing finally as the company has begun publishing insightful articles on the topic on its recently launched Virtualization Management Blog.
So far VMware published a couple of posts about capacity planning, a two parts series titled Rightsizing VMs using vCenter CapacityIQ which describe how the product tracks powered-off, idle, oversized and undersized virtual machines.
It’s a good start and hopefully the company will continue to publish articles on the topic.