Inventa

Helping you Make the Right Virtualization Decisions:
Inventa Virtualization Capacity Assessment and Planning (VCAP)

Key Issues Addressed:

• Virtualization has proven itself in development and pre-production, but how does it apply to production components?
• What are the business constraints that may supersede technical constraints?
• How do you engage the business stakeholders to become a part of the virtualization solution?
• How do you continuously validate results over time?

What We Bring to the Table:

• The Inventa Virtualization Capacity Assessment and Planning (VCAP) service evaluates your IT infrastructure and helps you to define the ideal path to a virtualized infrastructure that supports your business goals.
• The service delivers an integrated plan for addressing important areas of virtualization to help you identify improvements that provide the most impact with the least risk.

Virtualization is rapidly becoming a key alternative to physical servers because of its ability to maximize the use of physical assets while reducing their associated costs. As you expand the adoption of virtualization technologies, the planning, provisioning, monitoring, management and proactive servicing of these applications become even more critical needs to address.

But without proper control, you will not realize the benefits of your virtualization initiatives and the quality of service they deliver to the end users will suffer.

Our Solution

The Inventa Virtualization Capacity Assessment and Planning (VCAP) service provides the required set of initial benchmarks. This will ensure that your IT virtualization program includes integrated and granular plans to address all areas of the IT infrastructure, including: Windows, Unix, and applications, with financial projections and business benefits.

This roadmap ensures that consolidations in each area are supported by the others; for example, changes to the IT service management processes will be supported by the underlying technology and corresponding roles and responsibilities.

The biggest benefit of the roadmap is that it brings all the stakeholders on-board.

This service addresses the following key areas of IT virtualization:

• Identify Potential Candidates and Quick-Wins:
  Out of their vast IT infrastructure many companies do not know the number, location or the performance of their servers. You can locate the servers on your network and describe the servers which are candidates for virtualization. With these quick-wins you can justify the virtualization initiative and get buy-in from all the stakeholders.
• Qualify multi-tenant candidates:
  CPU utilization rates are not the only criteria to identify candidates for virtualization. Assessing the potential virtualization candidates to determine their ability to co-exist with others in a consolidated platform is required for success. This includes analyzing areas such as I/O and network requirements which are critical concerns when consolidating multi-tenant environments.

For example, it is not ideal to consolidate applications with heavy I/O and network requirements even though their CPU utilizations may be low. Similarly, if the total of the bandwidths of the consolidated applications exceeds the capacity of the NIC there will be performance issues.

Even when all the “hardware” issues are resolved there remain operational considerations. A number of servers may appear to be well suited for virtualization but several of them may also bear responsibilities for failover for other applications and this second responsibility would be compromised if this hardware were removed through consolidation without identifying a failover alternative.
This helps you in integrating the Virtualization initiative with business.

Continuous Reporting

A Performance Management Database (PMDB) is created to support powerful trend reporting for selected servers to insure against performance impacts from unanticipated demands on the consolidated infrastructure. This will help you elevate virtualization/consolidation to a continuous process to assure gains continue into the future.

The Application View

While virtualization and consolidation maximize the efficiency of the infrastructure, the impact on the supported applications must be considered.
The Inventa Virtualization Capacity Assessment and Planning (VCAP) service can expand the virtualization perspective to include applications with Extended Application Analysis.

This optional analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of the current performance health of selected applications. More importantly, IT will be able to project the demands of an application to the saturation point (point of performance failure) in the projected consolidated environment beforehand to assure application stakeholders of the future performance of their applications even before the start of virtualization/consolidation.

This analysis can include the modeling of application performance to project the impact of projected business growth on the virtualized infrastructure which closely links the business with IT.