vRops

vSphere Optimization Assessment

If you have not hear of vSphere Optimization Assessment(VOA), I do not blame you. It is one of the assessments VMware does not talk to much of. It is a partner tool(management pack for partner) used together with vRops. The title says it all, it is all about optimizing the resources you already have. So instead of always buying more hosts or storage, you can optimize your current environment and save money. The way it works is it utilises the intelligent of vRops with some new reports. Based on this report your VMware partner can give you a detailed overview of the potential cost savings you can gain. In my experience this number is between 40-60%, which is no small amount of money or resources. That is most likely what the business will care about, but it is not all it does. As I stated it is an optimization assessment tool. Which means that there are also VMs/applications which will benefit from having more resources. This in turn should mean happier customers  or users for your business.

When I say optimization think of it in it’s wides term. Is there a network bottleneck doing backup hours? VOA will catch it. Is there a VM which has high storage latency? VOA will catch it. I cannot talk for all partners to how they do it, but I can give you a few examples of how I have done it and the out come of it.

First of all, vRops is the tool to gather the data, but the report which is created is a 100% custom report for the given customer. It looks at how the environment is setup and if there is any configuration optimization opportunities, think NTP not enabled as an example. It looks at performance issues and lastly capacity usage.

Savings

Lets start by looking at a real world example of such capacity saving

Provisioned Recommended Reclaimable Saving
CPU        1.700,00                   750,00             950,00 56%
Memory      10.000,00               4.500,00         5.500,00 55%

 

Wow! Around 55% saved or if you are not looking to shrink the datacenter, then just think about the growth potential. You can have 55% more running in your current datacenter without having to buy more hardware, that should make most CFOs happy. I know that hassle with right sizing! It is never that easy. Then again it is really not up to the IT department to force upon the business to be high performant and cost effective, but it should be a health business goal to have there IT department running like that. So even if you are not able to realize all the benefits, at least you have a strong weapon which can be used anytime IT budgets or budget cuts in general are discussed. I goes to the IT departments creditability, to know their environment.

If you want to know more about vSphere Optimization Assessment, jump over to VMware’s website for more information -> https://www.vmware.com/assessment/voa

 

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