VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced an essential resource to assist virtualization administrators and data center managers in capacity planning. The new white paper, “Detecting Available VM Slots for Capacity Planning,” describes how to use VM performance metrics for memory, CPU, storage I/O, storage space and network capacity to determine counts for how many more VMs can safely fit within the existing virtualized infrastructure. This white paper comes on the heels of recent VMware announcements concerning licensing changes for vSphere 5, whereby licensing will be determined by pooled vRAM allocations. This pricing shift makes capacity planning, especially for VM memory resources, ever more important to determine adequate hardware and vSphere licensing needs. For further assistance in capacity planning, VKernel’s vOPS Capacity Manager can automatically calculate available VM slots and model capacity impacts in multiple “what-if” scenarios.

Capacity planning is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor for many data centers. Virtualized environments produce massive amounts of VM performance data that must be analyzed to derive precise VM slot availability results. Additionally, as environments are dynamic and constantly changing, these results must be updated repeatedly. The complexity and significant time commitment in capacity planning for virtual environments leads many data centers to employ a trial and error approach when creating new VMs. Yet, precise capacity planning results are essential to avoid performance degradation caused by VMs deployed in resource constrained infrastructures and to ensure that sufficient capacity remains available for expected environment growth.

VKernel’s new white paper, “Detecting Available VM Slots for Capacity Planning,” adds structure and instruction for the capacity planning process in order to eliminate a measure of complexity. This paper explains which VM metrics must be assessed, and how they should be used in calculations to derive precise counts of how many more VMs can safely fit in both HA and non-HA enabled infrastructures. For virtualization administrators that want to put the concepts described in the white paper into action, VKernel vOPS Capacity Manager automatically calculates these results on a real-time basis and can factor in scenarios for multiple VM deployments.

“With VMware’s shift towards a vRAM-based licensing structure for vSphere 5, adding precision to capacity planning and resource sizing decisions will become increasingly more important for many customers,” said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. “This new white paper lays out a metrics-based approach that virtualized data center administrators can use to gain more precise capacity planning results.”

VKernel’s “Detecting Available VM Slots for Capacity Planning” white paper is available at http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/vm-slots-for-capacity-planning. A free 30-day trial of vOPS Capacity Manager - which automates capacity planning by forecasting and managing virtual environment capacity - can be downloaded from http://www.vkernel.com/products/capacity-manager/overview.