You define scenarios that can potentially add capacity to actual data centers or remove capacity from actual data centers. VMware Aria Operations models the scenario and calculates whether your desired workload can fit in the targeted data center or custom data center.

Where You Find Infrastructure Planning: Traditional

In the left menu, click Plan > Capacity. The Capacity Plan page opens. Click What-If Analysis and in the What-If Analysis page, click the ADD button. Click Add Hosts or Remove Hosts in the Infrastructure Planning: Traditional tile.

How the What-If Analysis for Infrastructure Planning: Traditional Works

Infrastructure Planning for traditional environments lets you to forecast successfully the impact of adding capacity to your environment or removing capacity from your environment. By trying various scenarios, you can arrive at an optimum configuration. Once you select the Infrastructure Planning: Traditional pane, you can choose where you want to locate the additional capacity or from where you can remove the existing capacity.

In selecting the profile while removing capacity, you can select a profile only from server types that exist in your cluster.

In selecting the profile while adding capacity, you have two options:

  • Select a server type from a list of commercially available servers. You can select from a list of 1) server types already in your cluster or 2) all server types approved for purchase.
  • Configure a custom server manually by specifying CPU attributes, memory, and cost.

When you have set the profile for the new server, enter the number of servers to purchase or remove and the start and end date for the period when you want the scenario to be active. The number of servers that you plan to remove is limited by the number of selected server types available in the selected cluster. The system can project scenarios ending up to one year from the current date. By default, the starting date is today and the ending date is one year from today.

At this point, you can save the scenario to edit or run later on. A list of saved scenarios is available on the What-If Analysis main page. Otherwise, run the scenario to get the VMware Aria Operations analysis and assessment of your plan.

The system displays immediately the impact on cluster size of the additional or lesser amount of CPU and memory, and shows the total cost of adding or removing the specified capacity. The system also shows whether adding new capacity or removing capacity extends or shrinks the time remaining before CPU or memory runs out.

As well, the system displays a graphic depiction of resource use. For each attribute value - CPU and memory - the amount by which the workload increases or decreases the percentage of total capacity used is shown against a time line.