Workload Assessments - which tools are you using ?

jibbajabba

Just wondering what people actually use to assess current workloads to determine the suitability for visualization ?

Essendon

Is there a workload that cannot be virtualized?! I use VMware Capacity Planner in some cases, though most of my clients are small enough that just perfmon + some manual calculation usually suffice. Sometimes just some calculations suffice.

jibbajabba

Reason I am asking (and just to add, this was so far my approach - perfom and some basic calculations) is that i lost out on a very good job based on my lack of workload assessment. Apparently Perfom, Veeam, manually calculations showed not enough experience. This was a rather large (VERY known) company so they usually know what they are doing but didn't want to get into more details as to what they have expected.

Because of this I got thinking, what could there be possibly be which is better / more professional than Capacity Planner, Perfmon and Veeam.

I would understand Capacity Planner from consultancy point of view as this will need a reference vSphere cluster to test suitability ... so usually you don't have that reference and need to make a lot of assumptions ..

jibbajabba

Essendon wrote: »

Is there a workload that cannot be virtualized?!.

Wrong word I think .. more like the size of required vSphere environment. Oh and yes there are .. Customer of ours needed to Raid0 4 FusionIO cards worth £10k each in order to get just enough IO for their SQL servers

Essendon

Sorry about the missed opportunity mate, but I find it strange you've lost out on a job because of lack of experience with Capacity Planner/workload assessment. It would rather tell me that you did well without the tool! Anyways. When I was doing a DC migration project a while back, I used this tool called PlateSpin Migrate and during my training sessions with the company training my team on it, PlateSpin told us about a tool called PlateSpin Recon. Dont remember much from it as this was a few years ago, but worth looking into perhaps. And my company's server vendor, HP, told me about something called HP Sizing Tool that may work too, I no experience with that either.

Essendon

jibbajabba wrote: »

Wrong word I think .. more like the size of required vSphere environment. Oh and yes there are .. Customer of ours needed to Raid0 4 FusionIO cards worth £10k each in order to get just enough IO for their SQL servers

. Speaking of which, a customer of mine based in Adelaide needed a physical server because of a 512GB RAM requirement, some reporting server apparently. I agree there are things out there that are better off staying away from my ESXi clusters

jibbajabba

I once virtualized a single server lol. Customer had a storage intensive (size wise) image application which he required a SQL cluster for. Didn't want to take any advise, so who are we to judge (and refuse money). So I ended up building him a SQL cluster with the whole shebang. Later the customer found out that despite assurances by the vendor, the application was not cluster aware. So each time there was a failover he had to request a new license.

Long story short, I used the two SQL hosts and build a vSphere cluster with a single VM on it. Wasn't ideal as it was 4TB in size (4.1 cluster so lots of extends) but it was more reliable than the previous setup

Oh and thanks re Platespin. Forgot about it, I actually used it before (maybe adding it to CV as reminder).

Thanks.

Got another VMware consultant phone interview today. Company has something like 10 VCDX, would be great to get in.