The Virtual Capacity Planning Challenge

Capacity planning use to be one of those mundane IT activities that most organizations worried about once or twice a year. But with virtualization, the ability to easily provision virtual machines on physical servers is turning capacity planning into a major challenge.

To address this issue, CA Technologies today acquired Hyperformix, a provider of capacity management tools that work across both virtual and physical servers.

According to Subo Guha, vice president of virtualization product management for CA Technologies, virtualization management has become a major issue across the enterprise, which in turn is starting to stall adoption of virtualization. The issue, says Guha, is that customers are beginning to discover that the operational expenses incurred by having to throw more IT people at manually managing virtual servers is exceeding the capital savings derived from consolidating servers.

Guha says CA Technologies sees the capacity planning tools as a critical element of a general push to automate virtualization management across heterogeneous deployments of virtual machines from different vendors.

With the rise of virtualization and cloud computing, Guha says we can expect to see a resurgence in capacity planning brought on by the fact that IT organizations need to better understand what resources they have in place before they can automate the overall process.