3. Services Automation Tools : 3.1 Assessments and Capacity Planner : 3.1.1 What is Capacity Planner?
   
3.1.1 What is Capacity Planner?
VMware Capacity Planner is an agentless and robust capacity planning tool that provides an integrated set of analysis, planning, and decision support functionality that accelerates the delivery of accurate and benchmarked infrastructure assessment services for vCloud workloads. It is an integrated platform for analysis, planning, and decision making that enables comprehensive capacity planning, virtualization, and consolidation assessments. These assessments help to virtualize and consolidate datacenter vCloud infrastructure, redeploy strategic IT assets, and optimize vCloud workload planned capacity utilization.
Capacity Planner enables not only current state analysis of the existing infrastructure landscape, but also “what-if analysis” of the desired vCloud end state. It includes a rich set of components that deliver integrated capacity planning functionality including:
*Data collection.
*Data analysis.
*Decision engine based on industry benchmarks.
*Monitoring capabilities.
The following are key components of Capacity Planner:
*Data Collector – The data collector is installed at the customer site and uses an agentless implementation to quickly discover systems. It collects detailed hardware and software inventory data, as well as key performance metrics required for optimal capacity utilization analysis. The data collector can gather information from heterogeneous environments based on multiple platforms.
*Data Manager – The data manager manages the data collection process. It provides an organized view of the collected information and administrative control for the data collector including setting up the job schedules; starting, monitoring and stopping various data collection tasks. The data manager also manages the process by which the collected data is sent to the information warehouse.
*Information Warehouse – The information warehouse is a central hosted data warehouse where the data collected from the client environment is sent, scrubbed, aggregated, and prepared for analysis. The information warehouse also includes valuable industry benchmark data that can be leveraged for benchmarking, scenario modeling, and for setting utilization thresholds.
*Data Analyzer – The data analyzer serves as the core analytical engine that performs all the analysis required for intelligent capacity planning. It includes advanced algorithms that resolve capacity optimization challenges and support analysis capabilities such as aggregation, trending and benchmarking. Scenario modeling and the what-if analysis help model and test various planning scenarios including virtualization, hardware procurement and server consolidation scenarios.
*Capacity Planner Dashboard Portal – The dashboard portal is a web-based, hosted application portal that delivers capacity analysis and planning capabilities to users through a browser interface. Users can access a rich set of prebuilt analyses, order and examine data, and create custom reports. Planning capabilities allow users to set objectives and constraints, and also model and test scenarios to arrive at informed capacity decisions. The monitoring capabilities of Capacity Planner its dashboard enable proactive anomaly detection and alerts.
The following figure shows all of the Capacity Planner components.
Figure 2. Capacity Planner Components