5.14 Capacity Management for vCloud Service Providers
Achieving true elasticity is a challenge that every service provider faces. Allowing tenants to scale up and scale down their infrastructure based on demand requirements takes carefully considered capacity planning, hardware contingency and customer trend metrics. The ability to forecast demand and either allocate or reserve resources of future needs is a key requirement for VMware Cloud Providers.
The first crucial factor in capacity management is to get the architecture correct—the wrong design makes management and operations unnecessarily complex.
Figure 17. Capacity Management
It is also important that the service provider is constantly aware of their usable capacity and lead-time for expansion of compute, storage, and network resources. The final step for capacity management is configuring VMware vRealize Operations™ accordingly, to address and alert, based on the following core questions:
1. What is our typical virtual machine profile?
2. How many more virtual machines can we support based on actual workload as opposed to theoretical workload?
3. When do we need to add capacity for compute, storage or network?
