VMware has released version 1.5 of its vCenter CapacityIQ product. CapacityIQ is a capacity management solution for vSphere and this version is the follow-up of version 1.0.4. which was released in August this year. VMware released the first version of the product in October 2009 as an expansion to the company’s effort in the capacity management market. Before CapacityIQ, VMware first released Capacity Planner, acquired from AOG in 2005, as a hosted service for partners only, and then the Guided Consolidation module for vCenter.
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables users to analyze, forecast, and plan the capacity needs of their virtual datacenter environment. With this VMware competes with several of its partners providing the same functionality, like VKernel, which probably started supporting Hyper-V environments for its product for that exact reason.
vCenter CapacityIQ 1.5 includes the following new features and enhancements:
- Storage Analytics – Adds disk space and disk I/O trending and storage analysis. The dashboard and views provide visibility into consumption of storage resources and ways to identify capacity bottlenecks. The data is optimized for vSphere and accounts for thin provisioning, I/O control, and linked clones.
- Resource optimization – Adds storage-aware workload modeling and what if scenarios to forecast future capacity needs. CapacityIQ provides outlier detection and filtering capabilities for improved analytics.
- Scheduled Reports – Adds report scheduling with email capabilities for automated delivery of capacity utilization and optimization reports.
- Performance and scalability improvements – Improves the response time in the interface and raises the scalability limits to 6000 powered on virtual machines and 8000 registered virtual machines.
- Virtual machine-based licensing – Supports virtual machine and CPU-based licensing. If you obtain a virtual machine-based license for CapacityIQ, install and manage the license from vCenter Server instead of the Administration Portal. You can continue to manage CPU-based licenses in the Administration Portal.
This version of CapacityIQ will be licensed according to the new per-VM pricing model which VMware started in September this year.