How do virtualised environments affect capacity management?
A. Effects on capacity management primarily affect storage and its utilisation. With many federated physical server estates you’ll find utilisation is around the 40% to 60% mark. This is because you buy a server and typically it has a 140 GB or 73 GB hard drive installed, and yet the operating system or data may only come in at a half or third of that. When you move to a shared storage infrastructure, like a SAN or NAS [network-attached storage], you have the opportunity to streamline that. Many projects come into an organisation with a focus on a forecast data set of maybe a three or five year period, and that is allocated to the budget up front so capacity management will then procure and deploy the required capacity for that period, leading to overallocation. With virtual machines, they will only actually use the disk requirements in place today, so if an operating system has 8 GB it will use 8 GB rather than the fully allocated 12 GB. This leads to better utilization, which leads t
