According to a recent session at VMworld Europe 2009 on how VMware uses VMware ESX internally, VMware Capacity Planner remains one of a handful of services not yet virtualized by VMware. However, VMware is planning to run VMware Capacity Planner in a virtual machine by mid-2009.
This is interesting because a number of VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) partners are already frustrated with the performance of the VMware Capacity Planner Dashboard. Unless the target virtual machine is going to provide more resources to VMware Capacity Planner than it has on the physical machine, the performance is not likely to improve.
There are several other challenges in performing analysis and reporting with VMware Capacity Planner online:
- If there is no Internet connection, then there is no way to access VMware Capacity Planner. And since most consultants spend quite a bit of time on the road, offline access to customer data is extremely valuable.
- Some customers are not thrilled about sensitive data about their data centers being accessed online.
Products such as Lanamark Suite address the above issues by
- Allowing analysis, reporting and design to be performed offline.
- Never allowing access to data center metrics online (data must be downloaded and the consultant must be authenticated).
- Giving customers the option to send data directly to solution providers.
