OmniVision and Capacity Management

White Paper

September 2008

© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.

Abstract
Organizations are striving to operationalize their
approach toward managing capacity for both
virtual and physical server investments. In
order to operationalize the growing complexity
of their server environments, IT operations
teams face an important challenge: providing
sufficient IT capacity to meet the demands of
the business at all times while keeping costs
and operational efficiencies under control.
Unfortunately, the traditional non-scientific
method of assessing and managing capacity for
a few servers, falls short of the intelligence,
analytics, and scalability required to properly
and quickly assess environments extending
beyond 100 virtual or physical servers.
Hardware investments are often 50% of an IT
organization’s annual budget. Because the
investment is so substantial, IT organizations
and their management teams are under
constant pressure to:
• rationalize new purchases;
• maintain the right level of staff expertise
to manage the environment;
• ensure the right management tools and
processes are in place to provide proper
levels of visibility and control; and
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
• optimize service performance in the
existing landscape.
This paper discusses how OmniVision capacity
management software addresses these
challenges by providing clear insight to IT’s
preparedness to successfully meet the
business’ demands across the ever-changing
virtualized and physical server landscape.
This paper not only explorers how OmniVision
can be used to manage capacity across the
entire server, but how it also facilitates the
capacity management process. Organization’s
today rarely have the time or expertise to
introduce new ITIL practices like capacity
management. To accelerate adoption of
industry best practices for capacity
management, OmniVision has automated the
processes and analysis sought by IT Operations
Managers and System Administrators.
Although OmniVision is well suited for
experienced capacity planners, it is also a
powerful solution for non-specialists.
Discussions include details on OmniVision’s
functionality. This white paper describes the
features and functionality of OmniVision Version
5.9.2.
Table of Contents
OmniVision Methodology ...........................................................................................................4
OmniVision Architectural Basics ................................................................................................5
OmniVision Metrics ....................................................................................................................5
Capacity Management: Quality Reports.....................................................................................6
Introduction to Quality Reports...............................................................................................6
Quality Reports as a Guide to Capacity Issues...................................................................7
Quality Incidents.................................................................................................................7
Quality Severity ..................................................................................................................7
Capacity Management: Resource Reports.................................................................................7
Introduction to Resource Reports...........................................................................................7
Resource Reports Classification System............................................................................8
Resource Reports as a Guide to Capacity Issues ..............................................................8
Capacity Management: Virtual Capacity Reports .......................................................................9
Introduction to Virtual Capacity Reports .................................................................................9
Virtual Capacity Trends and Forecasts...................................................................................9
Virtual Capacity Reports as a Guide to Capacity Issues.......................................................10
Capacity Management: Virtualized Performance Reports ........................................................10
Introduction to Virtualized Performance Reports ..................................................................10
Virtualized Performance Metrics...........................................................................................11
Virtualize Performance Reports as a Guide to Capacity Issues............................................11
Summary .................................................................................................................................11
Component-In-A-Haystack Management .............................................................................11
OmniVision Domains of Value for Capacity Management ....................................................12

© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.

 front of capacity issues without jeopardizing any
OmniVision Methodology of the benefits from proactive management.
OmniVision accomplishes this in two ways. The
first is achieved by distilling the fundamentals of
Organizations have both budgetary and service
capacity management's best practices into a
quality reasons to "right size" their resources
multi-level algorithmic approach that distributes
against demands from the business and its key
a certain amount of detection and intelligence
stakeholders. OmniVision addresses these
across the infrastructure. The objective of this
issues by focusing on overload risks across the
method is to isolate and identify the risks of
entire IT enterprise. Managing capacity can be
saturation or performance degradation for any
achieved on a granular level focusing on
resource individually as well as within the
individual elements within the IT infrastructure,
context of the enterprise as a whole. The
but is even more powerful when applied to the
second pertains to delivering comprehensive,
IT server environments as a whole.
intuitive, and automated analysis to managers
and staff that often do not have the time or skills
At a macro level, managing capacity aids IT
to contribute to lengthy data collection, analysis,
managers in rationalizing new and optimizing
and interpretation efforts. OmniVision provides
current investments, prioritizing staff
best-in-class capacity analysis for non-
assignments, communicating priorities
specialists and capacity management experts
objectively to key stakeholders, and finding the
alike.
proper balance of a complex array of assets
used to deliver a better quality of service. At the
The OmniVision approach codifies the type of
granular level, managing capacity to minimize
analysis that a skilled performance or capacity
overload risk is a logical, automated extension
analyst performs, sometimes without conscious
of the methods used in past decades, before the
thought. If you present an experienced analyst
scale of the IT enterprise became the limiting
with a set of performance indicators, evolving
factor in that approach.
over time, they can determine the level of risk of
saturation shown by the indicators. OmniVision
One basic premise of capacity management is
can perform this same level of analysis,
to understand the balance of supply and
automatically, on thousands of systems and
demand that equates to risk levels. A resource
then provides the results in a series of easily
is at risk of saturation when the amount of work
managed web-based reports.
placing demands on the resource exceeds its
ability to respond optimally. As the imbalance
There are a few means by which OmniVision
between the demand and the ability to respond
presents its analysis of capacity and
becomes greater, the risk for saturation of that
performance:
resource increases.
• Quality Reports
OmniVision is a capacity management software
solution built specifically for the management of • Resource Reports
hundreds to thousands of virtualized or physical • Virtualized Capacity Reports
systems within a distributed infrastructure. • Virtualized Performance Reports
OmniVision’s powerful analytics are able to
constantly assess performance, availability, and Understanding the OmniVision approach to
capacity saturation risks across the data center capacity management requires an
– something that is impossible to achieve understanding of the basic structure of
through manual calculations or traditional OmniVision, the application of performance and
enterprise performance reporting tools. In saturation metrics and the methodology behind
virtualized environments, OmniVision capacity the evaluations in each type of report offered.
management focuses not only on the host The sections that follow will discuss how each
systems, but also on virtual partitions, pools, type of OmniVision report guides IT operations
clusters, and datacenters. managers through common capacity
management issues.
OmniVision's approach is to minimize all
aspects of system saturation risk by staying in

© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.


OmniVision Architectural Basics
Seen at the elementary level, OmniVision has a
three tier architecture. The first tier is
responsible for the analytic evaluation and risk
determination of data collected from each
virtualized or physical system being monitored
in the environment. At this tier, OmniVision
collectors are assigned to each system or virtual
machine. These collectors gather capacity-
related information on a multiple times each
minute. Hundreds of low-level, system-specific
technical data points are used to construct a few
normalized measurements used in analytic
evaluations and risk determination. Data from
heterogeneous systems is also normalized at
this level.
Once an hour, the OmniVision collector
compresses the capacity-related data and
transmits a small block of metrics to the second
OmniVision tier containing an active capacity
database (CDB). This tier accepts the hourly
metrics from each collector and stores the
information in the active capacity database.
Where other performance reporting tools are
limited in scale to 100 or 200 servers,
OmniVision has been built for short- and long-
term analysis of thousands of systems.
Intelligence features inside the second tier
perform two types of combination analysis on
the collected information:
• the first type of analysis aggregates and
stores the normalized metrics in logical
groups reflecting business assignments
(e.g., geographies, applications, lines of
business) or technical organizational
structures (e.g., clusters, pools,
virtualized servers); and
• the second type of analysis organizes
metrics into daily, weekly, and monthly
trend categories.
The final tier automatically generates out-of-the-
box capacity reports that can be used by IT
operations managers and systems
administrators to easily get a global or granular
sense of the well-being for the entire virtual and
physical server environment. OmniVision
reports can also be personalized, using an ad-
hoc query-based interface, to fit any specific
need for reporting on the capacity and
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
performance of virtualized and physical server
environments. Both automated reporting
methods, out-of-the box and intelligent ad-hoc,
use the OmniVision active capacity database as
a source of information to build reports or audit
information system resources.
OmniVision Metrics
The ability to quickly assess capacity,
availability, and performance across large,
complex data centers – for any given time -- is
impossible for any individual to achieve
manually. Too many variables exist, including
the number of servers, subsystems,
configurations, applications, OS types, OS
vendors, and workload behaviors.
To facilitate capacity evaluations, a number of
other enterprise management software vendors
rely on the collection, storage, and presentation
of raw performance metrics. This approach
expedites data collection, but continues to leave
analysis of the variables mentioned above to the
user. To make matters more complex, proper
analysis requires knowledge of individual
nuances within the raw data from system to
system, OS to OS, and configuration to
configuration. For example, memory utilization
measures from Linux are not calculated the
same as measures from HP-UX, AIX, or
Windows.
OmniVision facilitates the collection, analysis,
and presentation of metrics across the data
center. Multiple times per minute, OmniVision
collects hundreds of raw performance metrics
from each server. These raw metrics are then
evaluated, analyzed, and consolidated into
about 30 normalized metrics relevant to short-
and long-term analysis. OmniVision’s analysis
accounts for the nuances of each individual
system it order to create the normalized metric.
Because the metrics are normalized by
OmniVision, users can evaluate systems across
a server farm, cluster, pool, etc., down to the
individual server level. Without normalization,
accurate evaluation of capacity of environments
with over 100 VMs or physical servers would be
impossible.
From the normalized metrics, OmniVision
analyzes the data further into saturation risk
metrics. OmniVision’s saturation risk metrics
are used to analytically evaluate the level of risk
that an important resource (on any given host
node) could become overloaded. The metrics
provide qualitative information about resource
saturation risk that is also normalized across
differing operating systems and system
platforms. Saturation metrics also quantify the
level of risk to permit rational assessment of the
relative importance of the risk.
At its heart, the process of producing a
saturation risk metric is the same for each
evaluated resource. Multiple technical metrics
are compared against specific behavior
thresholds. The results of these comparisons
are weighted and consolidated to produce a
standardize measurement. OmniVision
expresses the resulting saturation risk levels as
a value between 1 and 5, where a value of 1
represents low risk and a value of 5 represents
high risk.
For each saturation risk metric, OmniVision
tracks three hourly statistics, providing the
average, the highest and lowest values
observed.
OmniVision calculates three saturation risk
metrics:
• CPU
• Memory
• Disk I/O
No other capacity management software vendor
offers saturation risk metrics. The algorithms
used to calculate and normalize these metrics
are proprietary to Systar.
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
Capacity Management: Quality
Reports
Introduction to Quality Reports
One of the most important aspects of any
Capacity Management practice is to ensure that
all systems are and have been meeting demand
requirements of the business. OmniVision
quality reports provide timely analysis and
visibility to any incidents where services have
been impacted due to capacity constraints.
Quality reports are designed for IT managers,
executives, and capacity management teams
who want timely, automated reports on critical
capacity-related incidents.
In order to prioritize efforts to fix (or avoid) the
most critical capacity problems, IT operations
managers will benefit by first taking a birds-eye
view of their system capacity. OmniVision
quality reports can quickly tell managers where
capacity problems exist, what the problem is,
and who has been affected. Quality reports
identify problems related to CPU-, Memory-,
I/O- and network performance, capacity
saturation, and overall availability. The
saturation threshold is evaluated from a set of
indicators that assess if the system is able to
process information without excessive delays.
Beyond the immediate operational impact of any
problem, OmniVision quality reports also inform
the manager when a capacity incident occurred
along with an assessment of its severity and
trend. In order to better determine the proper
priority level toward fixes, the quality reports
also inform managers of the duration and
number of occurrences for each capacity
incident.
To provide further clarity about an incident, the
quality reports reveal historical trends leading
up to any incident. Details of the capacity
incident (e.g., I/O saturation) are also compared
to previous days and weeks in order to better
identify if the problem offers any historical clues
or if the incident was relatively new in nature.
By assessing historical patterns of capacity
behavior, IT operations teams avoid making
short-sighted decisions that may minimize the
immediate disturbance but fail to correct the
root-cause of an issue.
Quality Reports as a Guide to Capacity
Issues
Typically, IT operations managers and capacity
managers review the weekly quality reports to
identify any ongoing capacity issues that require
short-term action.
Another common application of these reports is
to review them in conjunction with traditional
system performance and availability
management alerts. For example, if an alert for
high CPU utilization appears in the traditional
performance management console, it can
quickly be compared to OmniVision’s quality
reports for the same system. By reviewing the
OmniVision quality reports before any action is
taken, administrators can better determine if the
alert is related to a one-time event, or to a
longer term trend of capacity constraints.
These OmniVision reports offer a short
summary of service quality for each week using
a group perspective. The OmniVision user may
choose from a number of different service
perspectives including: functional group,
location, technology (platform/OS), and
organization.
Figure 1 - Weekly Service Quality Report
Figure 1 shows a sample weekly quality report from
OmniVision highlighting capacity status through easy to
read <weather reports>. Incidents from distributed
systems are grouped by server OS. Managers can use
the report to quickly pinpoint saturation issues or other
related incidents affecting capacity. By drilling down
within any of the troubled groups showing poor <weather
conditions>, managers are able to get more detail on
trends, severity, and impact of the incidents.
Quality Incidents
OmniVision highlights systems and groups of
systems based upon the detection and
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
classification of service quality incidents. An
incident can be either an interval when the risk
of resource saturation was likely to impact
optimum performance, or a period of application
or server downtime.
Quality Severity
Saturation incidents are given a severity rating
based upon the duration and scale of their
overall risk during monitored production hours.
OmniVision supports the identification of
production hours through the use of service
windows that are based upon time-of-day and
day-of-week.
Figure 2 - Quality Reports Reflecting Saturation
Figure 2 shows a sample dashboard from an ESX
server displaying I/O saturation. The reports on
this dashboard show the duration of incidents on
the ESX server, daily averages, and severity risk
levels (ranked 1 – 5) at intervals over the last
week. Similar reports are available for virtual
machines running on each ESX server.
Capacity Management: Resource
Reports
Introduction to Resource Reports
Another critical aspect of capacity management
practices is being able to quantify capacity
levels. IT operations managers and capacity
managers need to know how much capacity is
available to meet the demands of the
businesses they serve. Additionally, IT
managers would like to know how much of their
capacity is currently under-utilized or over-
saturated. One benefit of knowing what servers
are under-utilized is that targets for upcoming
server consolidation or virtualization efforts can
quickly be identified. A benefit of knowing which
servers are over-saturated is that considerations
for upgrades, workload reassignment, or
performance tuning can be prioritized toward
areas where change is needed most. Using the
OmniVision’s resource reports to communicate
IT’s capacity priorities to line of business
managers, procurement, or even the CFO can
help to further justify purchase requests or
denials with an objective perspective.
OmniVision resource reporting provides IT and
capacity managers with normalized information
about heterogeneous server environments in
order to help them objectively assess where and
when to optimize server resources, justify new
server investments and plan for infrastructure
growth.
The capacity utilization assessments performed
by OmniVision are based on a minimum of the
past three weeks of data collected. Reports
often assess internals weekly (9-week view) and
monthly (13-month view). Custom reports that
analyze one or several servers, on the last (n)
weeks or last (n) months, can also be
developed. These reports study the behavior of
any specific servers through time to objectively
decide whether upgrades or other capacity
remedies are needed.
In addition to displaying the status of under-
utilized and over-saturated systems, the
resource reports describe other elements of
capacity. Saturation of systems may be the
result of recent changes to the server
environment, including new machines,
subsystem upgrades (e.g., CPU, memory), and
new instances of existing applications or virtual
machines. OmniVision’s resource reports
identify these configuration or environmental
changes that may offer clues to growing or
declining capacity constraints.
Resource Reports Classification System
Resource reports enable quick system-wide
server capacity reviews using five levels of use
classification. Use classification assesses the
balance between the configuration of a server
and the workload it supports. There are five
basic levels of classification:
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
• Underused – the workload has no
measurable impact on system
resources
• Nearly underused – the workload is
measurable, but system resources are
underused
• Normal – the workload and system
resources are in balance
• Normal with Risk – resources are in
balance but the trend is worrisome
• Nearly overused – the system is
experiencing a measurable level of
saturation risk or is trending towards
saturation
• Overused – the resources of this
system are being saturated by the
intensity of the workload.
The system classification is performed weekly
for all system groups in the enterprise and is
reported at both the enterprise and group level.
Resource Reports as a Guide to Capacity
Issues
The automated analysis presented within the
centralized resource reports from OmniVision
act as the eyes and ears of IT and capacity
managers, allowing them to continually stay in
front of capacity and workload issues. Typically,
capacity managers use the weekly resource
reports as a shopping list of areas where
capacity issues will need attention, either to
expand, contract or reallocate resources.
The weekly reports show a global synopsis of
system capacity, with drill-down reports
available at several system levels (e.g., server,
pool, cluster, VM, partition, zone) to identify IT
server elements that are out of balance with
workload demand.

Figure 3 - Global Resource Reporting System
Classification
Figure 3 shows a sample of the high-level capacity
classification for an enterprise with four location groups.
Florida and California show the presence of overloaded
systems (red), while Florida and the corporate location
both display nearly overloaded systems (orange).
Capacity Management: Virtual
Capacity Reports
Introduction to Virtual Capacity Reports
Server virtualization technology can be
deployed quickly with relative ease. Once
deployed, virtualized server environments
require continuous planning and careful
monitoring. Properly maintaining the right level
of capacity in these environments requires new
tools, improved insight, enhanced skills, and
updated processes.
Complex configurations of virtual machines,
host servers, pools, and clusters can quickly
overwhelm any systems administrator trying to
assess the current state of capacity within their
virtualized server environments. When the
number of objects under management is small
(e.g., under 50 virtual machines), the number of
individuals with the technical skills to manage
capacity can be manually controlled. But the
same approach that works well for 50 virtual
machines fails to be cost effective for 500 or
5000 due to the investment of skills, manpower,
and the infrastructure overhead to needed
assess the many complex interactions that
define the capacity of the environment. The
challenge is multiplied when more than one
virtualized technology or operating system
platform are added to the mix.
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
To facilitate management of these complex
environments, OmniVision capacity reports
provide a clear picture virtualized server
capacity across the business – including both
Wintel- and Unix-based virtualization
technologies. Capacity reports allow IT
operations managers to quickly assess how
much virtualized server capacity is available,
where it is located, and if it is meeting the
performance expectations of the business it
serves.
Figure 6 - Virtualized Capacity Report
Figure 6 shows the current state of capacity in three
virtualized data centers. Within each data center, a
number of ESX server clusters are described by pool,
server, and VM configurations. The report also shows
the capacity status of the server clusters, where red
status bars represent frequent saturation of elements,
yellow represents occasional saturation, and green
represents no capacity constraint.
Virtual Capacity Trends and Forecasts
Configurations of a virtualized environment can
be in constant flux. Capacity planners and
systems administrators may be under
continuous pressure to meet physical to virtual
consolidation project objectives, optimize virtual
pools and server clusters to meet application
demands, or add new VMs to support a growing
user base. At the same time, business
demands of users and applications may
fluctuate due to seasonal activities, market
promotions, mergers and acquisitions, or batch
processing windows. Underused capacity can
quickly or gradually become saturated.
Where capacity reaches a saturation point in
virtualized environments gradually, capacity
managers and systems administrators can track
the trends using OmniVision’s capacity reports.
Reports such as the one below (Figure 7) reveal
the total capacity of virtualized servers, pools,
clusters, and VMs compared to their used
capacity over a period of several weeks. In
addition to showing historical trends for these
virtualized elements, the reports also provide
insight to future capacity usage.
Figure 7 - Weekly
Virtualized Capacity
Metrics
Capacity trends and forecasts are revealed in
OmniVision’s “9-week” reports. Trend and forecast
reports can be viewed by day or week for data centers,
clusters, pools, and servers.
Virtual Capacity Reports as a Guide to
Capacity Issues
Managing capacity within a complex virtualized
environment needs to begin with an
understanding of what is running where, how is
it configured, and how well the existing
infrastructure is handling the demands of the
business. IT operations managers and systems
administrators in charge of virtualized servers
use OmniVision capacity reports on a regular
basis to get a clear, consolidated picture of their
environment. Using OmniVision’s capacity
indictors, they can get a quick sense of where
configurations are challenged, then instantly
dive into the details of what infrastructure
elements are at or near saturation risk.
Using the capacity trend and forecast reports,
managers can also see if virtualized
infrastructure elements have been or will soon
be at risk. With this understanding, the team
can quickly prioritize changes to the
environment that will enhance its overall
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
performance, including options like VM
reassignments, new VM creation, assignment of
new CPUs or memory, or reconfiguration of
pools, clusters, and servers.
Additionally, where reports show under-utilized
virtual capacity, managers can prioritize efforts
to increase density of VMs on ESX servers or
aim to further consolidate workloads on physical
servers to the virtual environment.
Capacity Management: Virtualized
Performance Reports
Introduction to Virtualized Performance
Reports
Tracking down the cause of capacity-related
performance issues can be a challenge in virtual
server environments. Where traditional server
environments had relatively stable
configurations, virtual server environments
introduce the flexibility of resource pools, server
clusters, and limitless virtual machines.
OmniVision performance reports start with a
global view of virtual capacity that guide IT
operations and capacity managers toward
locations where performance has been
impacted due to capacity constraints.
Figure 4 - Virtualized Performance Report
Figure 4 shows a sample virtualized performance report
from OmniVision highlighting capacity status for
multiple datacenters through easy to read <weather
reports>. Managers can use these reports to quickly
pinpoint saturation issues or other related incidents
affecting capacity within each virtualized data center,
pool, and server. By drilling down within any of the
troubled groups, managers are able to get more detail
on trends, severity, and impact of the incidents affecting
virtual machines, -servers, -pools, and -clusters.
Virtualized Performance Metrics
Each datacenter displayed in the virtualized
performance report contains a set of clustered
ESX servers. Each of these clusters can
represent a number of virtualized pools, servers,
and VMs. OmniVision tracks incidents of
saturation risk and performance degradation of
each of these elements.
OmniVision performance reports provide a
summary of the operational performance
incidents for each CPU, I/O, and memory
element inside each datacenter down to the
virtual machine level. This allows IT/operations
managers and their teams to quickly assess
where resource saturation exists, the duration of
any incident, and recent capacity trends related
to that element (e.g., cluster, ESX server, VM,
CPU). OmniVision virtual performance reports
also profile capacity incidents by showing daily
hour-by-hour views, daily averages from the last
week, and averages over the past 30 days. The
capacity profile allows staff viewing the reports
to quickly assess if a problem is new or displays
repeated saturation incidents.
Figure 5 - Virtualized Performance Metrics
Figure 5 shows saturation reports for CPU and I/O on an
ESX server. Capacity incidents are summarized by hour,
day, week, and month. The charts at the bottom of the
report show saturation metrics from an average, minimum,
and maximum measure of risk.
The performance reports also help
administrators for virtualized systems to
assess how pool and VM configurations are
behaving within a single ESX server or
cluster. Activity reports are generated to
show:
• the inventory of VMs and pools
running on a server
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
• pools running on a server by CPU
consumption
• pools running on a server by memory
consumption
• VMs running on a server by CPU
consumption
• VMs running on a server by memory
consumption
• VM events (e.g., VM “moon” was
moved to server XYZ, VM “sun” was
created on server MNO)
Virtualize Performance Reports as a Guide
to Capacity Issues
IT operations managers and systems
administrators in charge of virtualized servers
often use OmniVision performance reports on a
weekly basis to review where saturation
incidents are either repeatedly impacting
performance or where virtualized infrastructure
has reached capacity limits for long durations of
time.
By gaining a better idea of where the saturation
of subsystem elements (CPU, I/O, Memory) are
impacting performance, virtual server
administrators can begin to plan for remedies to
optimize performance in those areas. For
example, if memory within a virtual server pool
is constantly saturated from 11am – 2pm on
Friday, administrators might want to allocate
more memory to the pool overall, or just within a
specific service window.
Summary
Component-In-A-Haystack Management
Capacity management is a challenging task
whenever the number of systems exceeds the
logical grasp of any one performance or
capacity analyst. The challenge is not so much
a technical one – the components and
construction of a good capacity study don't
really change with scale – but more of a
management one. How, given an enterprise
with hundreds or thousands of physical and
virtual servers, can you locate a server or virtual
pool that most needs attention right now? Which
out of all those ESX servers will be running out
of CPU horsepower this week, and which ones
are likely to run out next week, or next month?
That is the challenge. Assuming an organization
has the talent and expertise to understand
capacity issues once they are identified, the
barrier to their success is this simple: a basic
inability to be everywhere and to anticipate
everything at once.
OmniVision Domains of Value for Capacity
Management
OmniVision has a definite role to play in any
technical organization maintaining 50 or more
production servers or virtual machines. The part
OmniVision can play takes four forms:
• Immediate planning support –
OmniVision’s capacity database (CDB)
can be accessed through a query-based
interface to interrogate the enterprise
data store of activity and risk metrics.
The CDB can provide quick answers to
questions such as "what systems are
most at risk for CPU overload,
anywhere in my enterprise, right now?"
• Short-term planning – OmniVision
quality and virtual performance reports
offer a top-down, exception
management approach that identifies
where capacity issues are impacting
service quality. Capacity actions based
upon the systems and incidents
identified in these reports show a quick
return on investment in terms of
immediate solutions to current service
issues.
© Copyright 2008 Systar. All rights reserved.
• Mid-term planning – OmniVision’s
resource and virtual capacity reports
highlight areas and systems where
capacity if falling short of demand. As
virtual and physical systems become
classified as nearly overloaded, it is
generally time to start planning for
expansion, balancing or reallocation.
Resource and virtual capacity reports
provide early warning of trends in
growth, giving enough time for proactive
planning.
• Long term planning – Longer term
planning with OmniVision can now be
driven by organization and business
growth plans, using the automated
analysis to fine tune the general plans
into specific action as needed. Capital
purchases can be postponed until the
capacity needs appear in OmniVision
reports, rather than purchased in
anticipation of unquantified needs.
As discussed at the beginning of this document,
organizations have both budgetary and service
quality reasons to "right size" their resources
against business demand and need.
OmniVision addresses these issues by focusing
on overload risks across the entire IT enterprise.
Managing capacity to minimize overload risk
ensures the best performance seen from both
service quality and investment vantage points.