Measuring utilization in a virtual infrastructure is impossible with traditional management tools and requires new technology and approaches. The layer of abstraction that accompanies clusters, resource pools, and hosts cloud visibility, and the fluidity created by new capabilities such as resource reservations, DRS, and HA, introduce significant management complexity. Resource utilization data in a virtual infrastructure can be obtained using new, virtual-aware techniques, but this data alone is insufficient to manage, optimize, and plan the virtual infrastructure. This quantitative capacity and utilization data by itself lacks the qualitative information necessary to answer complex questions like:

• What is driving server utilization higher? What changes were responsible for the increase in demand or decrease in capacity? Were VMs added? Did hardware change?
• Why is SAN utilization dramatically increasing? Which users or groups are responsible for the increase? What is on the SAN and who owns it?
• How many more VMs can the infrastructure support? How many VMs are being retired? How many are underutilizing their resource reservations?
• Why are some VMs performing well and others poorly when they were all derived from the same source? What’s different? When did something change?

ManageIQ’s Enterprise Virtualization Management Suite (EVM) provides IT administrators and managers with a comprehensive solution to optimize their virtual infrastructures with advanced capacity planning and sophisticated resource management capabilities including trending and alerting. By combining extensive configuration and change information, and operational event data with utilization and performance statistics, EVM uniquely addresses both the quantitative and the qualitative management requirements enterprises need to get the most out of their infrastructure investment with the lowest management costs.

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