VMware® Infrastructure 3 FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 2. Getting the Scoop on Capacity Planning

When I first looked for information on capacity planning to design my virtual environment, I was surprised how little there was. In fact, various vendors offer capacity planning services but seem to cover the concept in a shroud of mysticism.

The concept of capacity planning is simple, though. You'll soon see capacity planning is no more difficult than thinking of traffic on a highway. You might even be able to do your own capacity planning for small and even larger networks. However, on larger networks, it may be far more time effective to use capacity planning software and/or a consulting company.

In this chapter, we discuss why capacity planning is so important and what you need to cover in order to put in the right equipment the first time.

Planning: Why You Have to Do It

If you're driving somewhere, chances are you don't want to sit in traffic. Data is the same way. If you have traffic jams in your flow of data, users come away from the system with a bad experience. Users don't want to deal with a slow system, and they shouldn't have to. Because you're going to save a lot of money by virtualizing, use some that money upfront to make sure you have enough hardware capacity to support your needs.

What you need to know about tightly coupled systems

Tightly coupled systems are dependent. A problem in one system can cause trouble in another. VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) is a tightly coupled system that consists of storage, networking, ...