Inchoate Curmudgeon

The typical method employed for migrating existing workloads to ESX from physical machines involves instrumentation of the workload in the current environment, coupled with technical and business analysis to determine:

• Workload suitability for virtualization
• ESX resource requirements to support the workload

The technical resource sizing method most often used leverages the VMware Capacity Planner. VMware capacity planner employs an offsite analysis of the workload in a VMware hosted service. This service utilizes collected VMware Capacity Planner metrics for over 20,000 machines, coupled with experience with factors affecting virtualization and ESX resource utilization, to provide a “black box” solution to consolidation target composition.

The solutions provided are generally accurate enough to substantially mitigate risks associated with oversubscription of ESX resources. Typically, organizations are able to migrate with minimal additional empirical workload testing from the physical server to the ESX virtualized environment.

Organizations that cannot use the VMware Capacity Planner facilities for workload analysis, due to policy or technical constraints that disallow the use of the VMware offsite analysis facility, must employ more elaborate and extended empirical testing of workloads to ensure that virtualized workload is suitable for VMware virtualization in the targeted configuration.

“VMware Migration and Consolidation Without the VMware Capacity Planner” discusses the issue and provides an approach for managing migration risks when the Capacity Planner is not an option.

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