8. vCloud Operations Control : 8.2 Capacity Management : 8.2.3 Process Automation, and Tool Alignment and Integration
   
8.2.3 Process Automation, and Tool Alignment and Integration
Capacity Management cannot depend on manual processes and activities in a vCloud. Given its ever-changing nature, effectively management of vCloud capacity requires an up-to-date view of usage and available capacity of services and infrastructure. Manual processes and most capacity tools cannot provide real-time capacity data.
vCloud providers must provide the capacity needed by vCloud consumers as required to meet to the agreed SLAs. For the provider to realize ROI, some level of resource sharing is required. Intelligence must be built into Capacity Management tools so that the dynamic usage of the vCloud environment is better understood, and any recurring usage behavior is clear. There needs to be a view of the vCloud customer’s environment and virtual datacenters to understand the capacity provisioned, the demand for the resources, and again, any recurring resource usage behavior.
To provide agile Capacity Management, it is important that no other process impact the delivery of additional capacity. For example, the change management process must be closely aligned with the provisioning process so that additional capacity can be rapidly put in place. Capacity provisioning can be at an infrastructure layer (hosts, storage, and vSphere), and at a service layer (new virtual datacenters, additional capacity to existing virtual datacenters). If the change management process involves lengthy change tickets and CAB attendance, some of the benefits of the vCloud are lost. A lengthy change management process can delay the introduction of additional capacity into the vCloud, which in turn could negatively impact the vCloud consumer’s services and associated SLAs.
You must understand the impact of each vCloud Director allocation model on the underlying vSphere infrastructure before effective Capacity Management can be implemented. Otherwise, it is not be possible to understand how the available capacity can be used by the organization virtual datacenters and virtual machines.
Each vCloud Director organization virtual datacenter has an underlying vSphere resource pool that supports it and provides the resources to all of the virtual machines in the deployed vApps. The configuration of an organization virtual datacenter has a direct relationship to the configuration of the vSphere resource pool and the virtual machines in it. For example, % guarantees in vCloud Director translate to reservations in the underlying vSphere components. This relationship between vSphere reservations and vCloud guarantees varies depending on the vCloud Director allocation model that is chosen.
Using VMware vCenter Operations Managerpart of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite—makes it possible to understand this complexity in vCloud implementations because the vSphere adapter provides specific vSphere metrics and an analysis of their impact on the environment. The Risk badge (see the following figure) in the vCenter Operations vSphere UI provides vSphere Capacity Management functions.
Figure 16. vCenter Operations Capacity Management in the vSphere UI
 
In vCenter Operations, the analytics functionality analyzes the current and past usage patterns of resources in a vCloud environment, and what-if scenarios help to establish future capacity requirements.
The VMware design guideline states that a provider virtual datacenter should be supported by an entire vSphere cluster. Then, you can view the capacity information for the provider virtual datacenter in the vCenter Operations vSphere UI by selecting the underlying vSphere cluster.
Because vCenter Operations can connect to multiple vCenter instances using the same adapter, you can manage the capacity of multiple resource provider virtual datacenters and the management cluster in a single implementation—provided that the implementation remains within the sizing guidelines for vCenter Operations.