0

So, I know there are a lot of great tools for analyzing current resource utilization and so on, but that's not what I'm looking for.

What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to plan how much hardware I need to buy (for simplicity, let's stick to just racks of servers, not networking and so on).

I know what our planned VM allocation will be for when we start off, but if I know I'll have X web servers, Y app server and Z DB servers (and I know what RAM, CPU, storage and network I want to allocate to each), is there a good way to figure out, "Ok, I need N blades with the following hardware specs...? I assume it's whatever my VMs need plus some overhead for the hypervisor and host OS plus some engineering wiggle room, but I'm hoping someone has a slightly more robust approach.

Every time I tried googling I got people trying to advertise tools for analyzing an existing install, which isn't what I'm looking for.

Note that this is NOT a generic capacity planning question as the VTC moderator closed me for. (Can you help me with my capacity planning?). I fully understand benchmarking and growth over time. What I’m specifically asking for is much more bounded than that: given that I already have estimates what virtual server resources I need, how do I translate that into a rough estimate of initial hardware to purchase? I recognize that once I’ve done that I’ll need to do the real work of benchmarking performance, balancing my VMs across racks and all that.

joeqwerty
  • 108,377
  • 6
  • 80
  • 171
Paul
  • 968
  • 1
  • 11
  • 19
  • @Sven please have another look, I don’t believe I’m asking the same generic, unbounded capacity question covered by the VTC. – Paul Oct 11 '18 at 10:26
  • This is still capacity planning, which is considered off topic here. – Gerald Schneider Oct 11 '18 at 10:26
  • @GeraldSchneider the VTC question does not indicate that anything with a whiff of capcity planning is off limits, it says that the community can’t help with certain types of capacity questions. I’m not asking thevommunity to tell me to buy X servers, I’m asking the community to tell me something like “VMWare hypervisor requires X RAM and Y RAM per physical server above your virtual requirements, you need to account for that in your purchase”. – Paul Oct 11 '18 at 10:30
  • 1
    As a rule of thumb, just buy a server and it will be okay. Yes I know it sound funny and surreal, on the first spot, but the sad truth is, that so is it going. Yes, it will be okay. – peterh Oct 11 '18 at 20:39
  • For future reference, there *are* in fact ways to do this at the level I was asking for. Here's one example: https://wintelguy.com/vmcalc.pl – Paul Oct 12 '18 at 16:51

0 Answers0