Capacity Analysis with the vCenter Operations Manager Management Pack for NetApp Storage

Capacity is a fundamental concern of managing storage environments. As an administrator, you need to know your capacity capabilities and capacity constraints. You also need to know when your capacity requirements will exceed your capabilities or constraints.

How do you know when you will run out capacity?  You could guess. You could look at the numbers and determine a clever algorithm. Or, you could let vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) take care of it all for you.

Here’s how. Navigate to the Forensics tab in vCOps and select Capacity Analysis.

The Capacity Analysis dashboard is a powerful tool available to all Resource Tags in vCOps. For our purposes, we want to select a NetApp storage component from the Resource-Tags selection widget. You will see NetApp layers – volumes, LUNS, qTree, etc – available for selection.

Next, select the desired Resource from the List widget and Metric to forecast from the Metrics widget.  Set the breaching threshold that you wish to predict against. Finally, click the Forecast This button.

The result is the exact date and time vCOPs predicts the metric will breach your defined threshold. The number crunching behind the scenes is pretty impressive and incredible accurate.

Now you have an answer for “when will we need more X” based on real, data-driven trends. No guesswork, and no calculators required.