TA22 Technology Preview: vCenter CapacityIQ

One of the new promising to be released products of VMware is vCenter CapacityIQ. It is a vCenter plugin which monitors the capacity of your virtual infrastructure. It is shipped as a virtual appliance including a database used for storing capacity data. The presenter did not know which database will be included.

The product is able to forecast the needed capacity in the near future based on historical data. This enables the IT department to add new server capacity or resources in time before it is actually requested. Nowadays to overcome provisioning time of servers most IT departments have more resources available than needed at peek times.

The product is also able to perform what-if scenario’s. For example, how many ESX hosts would I need if I add 20 more virtual machines.

Besides planning for the future, the product can also adjust the configuration of currently running virtual machines such that it has enough and not more than that resources to cope with the demand.

While VMware Capacity Planner is used for planning of physical servers and can only be used by VMware Partners , CapacityIQ is targeted at virtual machines. Integration of both products is not foreseen.

The next release  of CapacityIQ will have integration with vCenter Chargeback. As CapacityIQ is a plugin for vCenter it will scale the same. Release date will be the second half of 2009. The beta program will start within the next months.   

Unfortunately no live demo of the product, just a few screendumps.