WHITE

Capacity Planning:
The Blueprint for Server Consolidation

PAPER

VMware white paper

Table of Contents
Executive Summary................................................................................................. 3
Growing Support for Consolidation........................................................................ 3
Standard Approaches to Capacity Planning........................................................... 3

Inventory............................................................................................................ 3

Utilization of Current Capacity.......................................................................... 3

Utilization Variation over Time.......................................................................... 4

Analysis: Determining How to Consolidate....................................................... 4

CapacityPlanner...................................................................................................... 5
Analyze............................................................................................................... 6

Plan..................................................................................................................... 6

Model.................................................................................................................. 6

Monitor............................................................................................................... 6

How CapacityPlanner Works................................................................................... 6

Data Collector..................................................................................................... 6

Data Manager..................................................................................................... 7

Information Warehouse...................................................................................... 7

Data Analyzer..................................................................................................... 7

CapacityPlanner Dashboard.............................................................................. 7

Rigorous Information Collection........................................................................ 7

Intelligent Capacity Analysis.............................................................................. 7

VMware white paper

Capacity Planning: The Blueprint for Server Consolidation

Executive Summary

Standard Approaches to Capacity Planning

Server consolidation has become a key element in IT planning

in recent years because it offers a range of benefitsfrom
lower hardware, software, and personnel costs to improved
reliability and the management efficiencies of standardized
infrastructure.

To chart the most effective approach to consolidation in a

particular IT environment, analysts need a variety of information
on the existing infrastructure and data on how the hardware in
that existing infrastructure is being used.

Virtualization is a key enabling technology encouraging the

server consolidation trend and is now becoming a core part of
strategic IT planning.
Planning for server consolidation through virtualization can be
a complicated undertaking. Large IT environments have dozenssometimes hundreds or thousandsof servers running
a multitude of applications and services for a wide range of
departments, owners, and business domains. Deciding how
to best combine these into fewer, more manageable physical
resources, while at the same time planning for future expansion,
unexpected demands, and organizational changes, can be a
daunting task.
VMware Capacity Planner provides insights into the server
resources available in the IT infrastructure and the ways those
resources are being used. It integrates and displays data on
server inventory and performance so system analysts have the
information they need to build the greatest possible efficiency
into a server consolidation plan.

Growing Support for Consolidation

Server consolidation has been a hot topic in recent years.
Industry analysts from such organizations as IDC and Gartner
along with writers for top trade publications have found that
server consolidation offers such benefits as:
Reduced hardware and maintenance costs
More efficient use of datacenter space
Simplified and more consistent operating environment
More effective management of enterprise IT resources
Improved reliability and flexibility
Virtualization has shown itself to be one of the most important
approaches for enabling consolidation. It is being adopted as a
core part of strategic IT planning in organizations of all sizes.
This white paper explains the issues involved in capacity
planning, why Capacity Planner is the ideal tool for addressing
those issues, and how it can achieve specific consolidation
results.

Inventory
To make good decisions about capacity planning, and about
server consolidation as a step in the process, the project team
must begin by obtaining a detailed understanding of what
capacity is currently present. A starting point of any inventory
exercise is simply to count the existing resources. For server
consolidation and other capacity planning activities, project
teams also need detailed information on four core hardware
components: processors, memory, storage, and network
adapters. Detailed knowledge of applications, services, and
shares is equally valuable.
Traditionally, consultants and customers have to collect the
data manuallya step that can be costly. Agent-based management tools can help, but they are seldom fully implemented
across an entire enterprise. The gaps may be a result of budget
constraints, lack of internal process, or lack of knowledge about
where the organizations servers reside. Unknown servers may
exist because of purchases by independent departments,
recent mergers, or refreshes that did not include procedures
for disposal, among other reasons. The average enterprise
underestimates the number of servers in its environment by 20
percent. In some cases this miscalculation reaches 50 percent.

Utilization of Current Capacity

Besides knowing what capacity exists, the project team needs
to analyze how that capacity is being used. The team might
gauge performance in a multitude of ways; however, a core
set of performance metrics can identify the utilization and
throughput for such key server resources as processor, memory,
network adapter, and storage. It is also important to capture
additional performance metrics for specific applications.
Inventory tools focus on inventory data collection. Performance
tools focus on performance data collection. Few tools provide
both sets of data. If a tool collects both, the tool is typically
agent-based. As in the case of inventory information, an agentbased tool's data is accurate and complete only if the agent
software is installed on every computer.

VMware white paper

To turn the performance data into useful information, it must

be correlated with inventory data. Many organizations attempt
to use a performance monitoring tool by itself. The performance logs paint a picture like that shown in Table 1.
Server

CPU% Utilization

10%

20%

30%

40%

Overall performance

25%

Table 1: Uncorrelated Performance

For server consolidation and capacity management, the conclusion that utilization is 25 percent is inaccurate. When inventory
and performance information are combined, as in Table 2, the
results give a more useful picture.

Utilization Variation over Time

Calculating average utilization has some value, but it is more
important to know peak hour utilization. Peak utilization will
differ within a 24-hour period based on the types of users,
applications on the server, scheduled maintenance, and so
forth. The peak hour is the one hour in the 24-hour period
that has the highest average utilization. Average utilization is
calculated using data collected between the hours of 7 a.m.
and 7 p.m., for example, or for the entire 24-hour period. The
difference between these two metrics is significant, as can be
seen in Figure 1.
30.0%
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
10.0%
5.0%
0.0%
1

Server

CPU%
Utilization

CPU
Capacity

Utilization

10%

3000MHz

300MHz

11

13

15

17

19

21

23

Hour
Utilization

Average

20%

1500MHz

300MHz

Figure 1: Comparison of hourly measurement vs. daily average of utilization

30%

500MHz

150MHz

40%

200MHz

80MHz

5200MHz

830MHz

Most system tools focus on real-time performance statistics or

24-hour averages. Many tools collect the data but then require
users to take time-consuming steps to extract and manipulate
performance data to determine the peak hour average. As
noted in other sections of this paper, it is impossible to collect
data from servers using these tools unless the servers have the
necessary system management tools installed. And it is unlikely
the system management tools will be installed on servers that
are not included in an official inventory.

Overall
capacity
utilization

16%

Table 2: Correlated Performance

The correlated data show more opportunity for server consolidation, revealing that capacity utilization is only 16 percent.
The analysis based on percentage of CPU utilization alone was
distorted by the fact that older, slower CPUs were being used
more intensively than newer, faster CPUs. VMware has found
that 40 percent of the servers at a typical client site are slower
than 500MHz. Capacity Planner has found new, state-of-the-art
servers running below ideal capacity while older servers are
pushed to their capacity limits.
The capacity calculation is further complicated by the fact that
particular processors have different capabilities. To provide an
accurate picture of resource utilization, the analysis tools must
adjust for differences between 64-bit and 32-bit processors and
for differences between such new technologies as the AMD
Opteron and older technologies such as the Intel Xeon.

Analysis: Determining How to Consolidate

After all the necessary and relevant information has been
obtained, the most important step follows: using this information to recommend changes that will consolidate the environment in an effective yet manageable way. Several considerations should be addressed to achieve this goal.
First, the performance of the applications in the current environment may not be optimized. For example, any of the following conditions can lead to excessive resource usage:
Poorly configured storage resources
Excessive virus scanning on Exchange systems
Bad index design on SQL Server systems
Excessive logon processing in Citrix environments
Although the project team could undertake a performance
study on each application and perform tests to see where additional efficiencies can be wrung out of a system, this process is

VMware white paper

very time-consuming and requires expertise beyond what most

IT organizations are willing to budget. A more attractive alternative is to compare utilization rates with industry averages and
ISV-provided benchmarks. After your team has identified the
applications that have the largest potential for improvement,
you can focus tuning efforts on those applications.
Getting the most efficient utilization in your current environment is the first step. Next, you must decide which servers can
be virtualized and run on the same system. This involves careful
consideration of such factors as:
Which workloads can be combined based upon the predicted
total resource utilization, a combination of CPU, memory,
storage, and network. This depends on the resource utilization
of each original server as well as thresholds for usage based
upon factors such as peak load.
Which servers are too obsolete to maintain, and what server
hardware can be purchased in order to achieve a net consolidation gain. For example, by retiring 10 old servers and
virtualizing their workloads to run on one new server, the
capital purchase cost could be more than offset by savings in
power, cooling, rack space, and network ports.
When you virtualize servers, you must also determine which
workloads to consolidate onto a particular host system. Some
customers are tempted to stack multiple virtualized servers
running the same application into a single ESX Server system.
This approach limits the consolidation opportunity, because like
applications compete for the same resources.
What you want your project team to do is determine what
resources each application requires, then match applications
that demand different resource allocations to maximize your
virtualization opportunity , as shown in Figure 2.

Similarly, you must evaluate the demand placed on various

servers at different times of the day. Your team needs to
combine virtualized servers in a way that balances load during
the day, as shown in Figure 3.
In principle, decisions like these can be made by an IT analyst
studying inventory and utilization data. In practice, however, the
mathematical complexity becomes unmanageable in any but
the smallest environments.
Clearly, a tool that can consider all these factors must be
one that is uniquely designed to embody all the principles
of capacity planning. While systems management tools from
Hewlett Packard, Mercury, IBM, and others are the workhorses
that keep systems running, and while these tools will continue
to evolve, Capacity Planner provides a complementary software
tool to answer the core questions you need to consider for a
consolidation project.

Capacity Planner
VMware Capacity Planner is an enterprise IT capacity planning
solution designed specifically to collect and analyze the data
you need to plan an effective server consolidation project.
It enables faster, more accurate, benchmarked infrastructure
assessments and provides project teams the integrated set of
analysis, planning, decision support, and monitoring functionality they need to enable and accelerate server consolidation and
capacity optimization projects.
At the heart of VMware Capacity Planner is a unique
Information Warehouse, which houses a constantly growing

B AD

B AD

1AM

1P M

1AM

1AM

1P M

1AM

1AM

1AM
Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

1P M

50%

50%

B E TTE R
B E TTE R

50%

Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

Network

Dis k

CPU

Memory

Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

Dis k

Network

CPU

Memory

1AM

1P M

1AM

1AM

1P M

1AM

1AM

1P M

1AM

50%

Figure 3: Optimal consolidation based on resource utilization over time

Figure 2; Optimal consolidation based on resource type utilization

VMware white paper

set of industry reference data that is used to drive intelligent, benchmarked IT capacity recommendations for the
enterprise.
VMware Capacity Planner delivers compelling value to
project teams and the organizations they work for by:
Automating and streamlining the capacity planning
cycle
Enabling accelerated, more accurate, benchmarked infrastructure assessments
Guiding intelligent, objective capacity planning and
server consolidation recommendations
Driving increased productivity, reduced complexity, and
improved predictability of IT infrastructure
With Capacity Planner, your project team will be able to
answer questions they might not be able to answer with
certainty today, such as:
How many servers do we have?
How well are we utilizing them?
What is the right amount of capacity?
What are the options and what is the best recommendation?
How else can we better optimize our environment?
Capacity Planner provides the tools to assess your needs,
plan for and decide on consolidation strategies, and
monitor your infrastructure to maintain its efficiency.

Analyze
Capacity Planner enables your project teamconsultants,
staff, or a combination of the twoto conduct comprehensive assessments of your existing infrastructure
to assess how much IT capacity currently exists and how
well this capacity is being utilized. Agent-less implementation ensures discovery and inventory of all hardware
and software assets, providing a complete view of the IT
infrastructure. Capacity Planner then correlates key performance metrics with inventory data to generate server load
profiles. This information enables your team to analyze and
evaluate how well current capacities are being utilized.

Plan
Capacity Planner enables your team to develop an effective
capacity optimization plan so you can determine exactly
how much IT capacity you really need, considering current
and future business needs. Capacity Planner enables
your team to analyze capacity utilization metrics, predict
capacity needs, forecast utilization trends, and compare
your data against industry benchmarks. Your team can also
identify opportunities and alternatives for capacity optimization, whether they involve hardware refresh or new


purchases, disposing of old servers, migrating applications, redeploying existing assets, or implementing a virtualization solution.
And Capacity Planner provides the ability to set success criteria,
constraints, and thresholds against which these alternatives can
be evaluated in the decision phase.

Model
During the modeling phase, Capacity Planner enables your
planning team to evaluate the various alternatives generated
in the planning phase. Your team can use scenario modeling to
test alternatives including purchase planning, virtualization, and
server consolidation. They can also conduct what-if analyses for
consolidation based on different groupings, thresholds, target
servers, and other factors. Your team can recommend the alternative that best meets the success criteria and represents quick
win, high-profile consolidation-success opportunities to build
business unit support. Capacity Planner then enables your team
to clearly articulate different scenario outcomes and present
recommendations in their assessment reports and project proposals.

Monitor
Capacity Planner helps you continuously compare resource
utilization against benchmarked thresholds to ensure ongoing
capacity optimization. Your planning team can provide periodic
reports that monitor current capacity utilization and compare
them to industry benchmarks in order to detect anomalies
in utilization. Automated alerts and monitoring capabilities
enable your team to detect deviations in utilization trends,
predict capacity problems, and make timely troubleshooting
and optimization recommendations. They can continue to take
advantage of Capacity Planner capabilities to ensure that you
are able to manage unexpected or planned changes in capacity
requirements and utilization over time.

How Capacity Planner Works

VMware Capacity Planner is a Web-based capacity planning
application that combines inventory and utilization data. It
gathers the data without any need for agents installed on
the target systems. It then generates optimization recommendations, enables modeling for server consolidation and
virtualization projects, and provides ongoing capacity planning
decision support.
The key components of Capacity Planner are the Data
Collector, the Data Manager, the Data Analyzer, the Information
Warehouse, and the Capacity Planner Dashboard.

Data Collector
The Data Collector discovers and inventories information from all
of the computers on your network or from only the subset that
you want to evaluate. It uses operating system APIs to communicate with all targeted servers in order to collect the information

VMware white paper

required for analysis. No software or agent is ever installed on

any server. The Data Collector runs on a single workstation, and
all collections are executed using remote procedure calls.
Network traffic impact is minimal, and the CPU load on the
server targeted for data collection is less than 1 percent. This
minimal impact ensures completely unobtrusive visibility into
computing infrastructure.

Data Manager
The Data Manager provides an organized view of the collected
information and administrative control for the Data Collector.
This includes detailed and summary views and reports on all
discovered objects, collected inventory, and monitored performance information. The Data Manager also includes data
synchronization capability that is used to send sterilized, anonymous data in the form of CSV files over Secure HTTP (HTTPS) to
the Information Warehouse.

Information Warehouse
The Information Warehouse is a central data warehouse hosted
in a remote, secure location in the United States where collected client data is sent and stored. A data upload utility parses
the CSV files, then scrubs and processes this data before loading
it into the Information Warehouse. The Information Warehouse
also includes industry benchmark and research data derived
from data collected from hundreds of Capacity Planner client
sites. This data is not client-specific but instead represents
valuable industry averages such as industry performance
averages for different types of servers and maximum observed
values or thresholds on server resources.

Data Analyzer
The Data Analyzer serves as the core analytical engine that
processes all the analysis required for intelligent capacity
planning. It includes advanced algorithms that solve capacity
optimization problems and supports analysis capabilities such
as trending, regressions, scenario modeling, anomaly detection and alerts. The Data Analyzer combines inventory and
performance data to develop server load profiles and calculate
insightful utilization metrics. It also aggregates data from different collectors across client installations to prepare industry reference metrics (such as averages and ratios) that then serve as
benchmarks. Alerting capabilities enable users to define thresholds and set alerts to monitor any data within the Information
Warehouse.

Capacity Planner Dashboard

The Dashboard is a Web-based, hosted application that delivers
a rich set of IT infrastructure analysis and capacity planning
capabilities to users through a zero-footprint browser interface
that requires no proprietary software installations or downloads.
The interface provides a rich set of analyses that enable you

to clearly visualize and gain insight into infrastructure. Reports

provided with the Dashboard range from inventory, performance, and utilization reports to advanced analyses that enable
project teams to run what-if scenarios and generate intelligent
capacity optimization recommendations. In addition, users have
the ability to create and save their own custom reports. Users
can manipulate data, drill down from summary to detailed data,
apply filters, and sort data to gain different analytical views of
the information. Security and access control features ensure
secure, authenticated, and authorized access to and protection
of information from particular customer sites. Users can also
continue to monitor data and provide periodic reports and
capacity optimization recommendations.

Rigorous Information Collection

The Data Collector component of Capacity Planner installs
on a single workstation or server at a customer's site. Without
the need to install any agents on target machines, it discovers
servers and desktops by name and operating system within
minutes. Over the next few hours, Capacity Planner collects a
detailed inventory of all servers and desktops.
Capacity Planner collects from targeted servers more than 40
core performance statistics plus additional relevant statistics
for specific applications. This low-overhead query collects
performance metrics from the four main data groups of processor, memory, storage, and network utilization. For memory, for
example, Capacity Planner collects not only paging data or
what is available in bytes but also specific cache information
that affects the overall project decision strategy. This data is
then correlated with the previously collected inventory data.
Capacity Planner collects data every hour and calculates peak
hour utilization for each one-hour increment in the 24-hour day.
After several weeks, it identifies utilization for the busiest hour
in the week. Capacity Planner also maintains weekly summary
statistics that track maximum observed, minimum observed,
average, hourly, prime time, nonprime time, and weekend
loads. In addition, Capacity Planner maintains a summary for
the most recent four weeks of performance statistics on these
same criteria. The summary is used to determine peak load for
consolidation recommendations. Peak load is determined by
finding the hour of the day with the highest sustained load. It is
not a measure of maximum observed values.
After four weeks of performance collection, trend lines become
valuable and performance projections can be made. These
projections are very important. For example, you do not want to
consolidate multiple loads into a single physical server only to
run out of capacity in a month.

Intelligent Capacity Analysis

Capacity Planner tracks and maintains current software vendor
benchmarks for servers in its Information Warehouse and


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produces an alerts table showing servers in a customer's organization for which performance data deviates from these vendor
values.
Capacity Planner tracks and maintains the industry averages
for software performance in its Information Warehouse
and produces an anomalies table showing the servers in a
customer's organization for which performance data deviates
from these average values. The industry averages are based on
the most recent four weeks of data collected from all Capacity
Planner sites.
For more information on virtualization and capacity planning,
visit www.vmware.com.

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VMware, Inc. 3145 Porter Drive Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 650-475-5000 Fax 650-475-5001 www.vmware.com
2006 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. Protected by one or more of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,397,242, 6,496,847, 6,704,925,
6,711,672, 6,725,289, 6,735,601, 6,785,886, 6,789,156 and 6,795,966; patents pending. VMware, the VMware boxes logo
and design, Virtual SMP and VMotion are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or
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registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their
respective companies.