When I read the eWeek article entitled, “How to Manage Capacity in Virtualized Environments” I finished wanting more. Actually, I finished realizing TeamQuest already has more to offer.

Explaining the ITIL definition of Capacity Management is great, but how about expanding a bit further and drilling down into the details – from a Capacity Management perspective. Since the author, Rob Smoot, is a Group Product Marketing Manager at VMware, let’s focus on VMware.

TeamQuest offers scalable, agentless performance data collection for both VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors and:

• vSphere 4
• AIX PowerVM, including LPARs and WPARs
• Solaris Containers, Zones, and LDOMs.

TeamQuest Model, one tool in our suite, can predict performance in advance, help to optimize services and avoid costly bottlenecks altogether. We can find the least-expensive, best-performing configurations for P2V consolidation, ensuring that service levels will be met. IT managers can quickly determine the best way to allocate resources to VMware guests. And unlike other tools, TeamQuest Model understands response times inside virtual machines.

Take a look at a previous blog post entitled, “It’s CRAZY to Run Just One App Per Virtual Server.” Ron Potter, TeamQuest’s Manager of Best Practices outlines the benefits of running multiple applications on a virtual machine and the planning needed to ensure you have the right configuration for the right situation. In fact, Potter takes this a step further in his white paper, “Grab More Post-virtualization Savings.”

Also, check out the press release on TeamQuest’s VMware capabilities, or our website on managing a virtual environment, or for some real nitty gritty details, see our white paper entitled, “Managing a Virtual Computing Environment – How TeamQuest Supports VMware’s Virtual Machines.”

Remember virtualization is not a cure-all. Capacity Management improves your virtualization tools. It’s a discipline that, when used with the right tools, allows you to get the most from your virtualization efforts.

If you would like to further the discussion on how to truly manage capacity in virtualized environments, don’t hesitate to contact us directly or leave a comment below. We look forward to hearing from you!

Many organizations operate IT in firefighting mode, reacting to performance incidents when they occur. It is surprisingly less often that organizations perform capacity planning up front, though that would ensure that systems will provide necessary service levels without interruption. Being reactive is more expensive, but nonetheless, more common than being proactive. Maybe it’s human nature. It seems that few organizations possess the maturity to see the value of formally addressing capacity issues in an organized manner.

Maybe that’s changing.

A recent Network World article, “10 best IT jobs right now,” predicts that “Capacity Manager” will be an up and coming job title in 2010. In the article Denise Dubie suggests that tough economic conditions combined with added complexity from virtualization should help influence companies to pay more attention to capacity planning. Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester and Cameron Haight of Gartner are both quoted as emphasizing the strategic importance of capacity management for organizations seeking to maximize the value provided to a business by its IT organization.

At TeamQuest we’ve got tools for both proactive and reactive performance management, but we always try to influence customers to take a more proactive, service point of view. We suggest that the organizations with the highest level of capacity management maturity analyze IT capacity in terms of the business value that it can bring to an organization. (See the recent post here on the TeamQuest Capacity Management Maturity Model).