Enterprise Capacity Management Special Interest Group

SIG meeting are generally held on the third Tuesday of even months except December, in association with Australian Computer Society NSW Branch. An introduction [pdf] is available.

Next Meeting

• 2008-08-19 (details) On the Run: Architecting and delivering Wintel Virtualisation with VMware accurately by Shmuel Markovits (IBM)

  You are not the sys admin, nor have possession or access to the sys console nor do you have sys admin tools but THEY expect you to know.

  You have been asked for a back of an envelope estimate about virtualising a wintel farm in the middle of a meeting. You want to sound authoritive but you don't want to get it wrong. After this presentation you will be able to use reasonable rule of thumbs that the experts use.

  You have offered an estimate but what sort of qualifications should you be adding. Any gotcha's? What, if any, are the limitations that the environment dictates that you need to consider?

  Know how to quickly and accurately assess current performance of your VMs. This presentation will show you how to do this using standard tools supplied with ESX (snapshots from a real servers in a VMware ESX 2.5 and 3.0 data centre).

  Define classes of applications which are the ones you can be confident recommending virtualisation, and be aggressive about their specifications and what class of applications should you preferably be conservative about.

  Know how to mix and match the various applications on the VMs for an optimum performance mix.

  There is plenty of reading material available but what utilities, help guides, help centres, wikis, blogs are out there at the moment that can of use or be brought in to help me easily and quickly.

  After attending this session Shmuel want's his audience to feel confident in assessing a WinTel Virtualisation opportunity and to be able know that engineering and ops can fully deliver to complete customer satisfaction. The topic is about offering rule of thumb knowledge distilled from copious details, that work.

  Biography: Shmuel Markovits
  
  Shmuel Markovits is currently working with the Performance and Capacity team within IBM. Shmuel has extensive software development, testing and deployment experience, worked in diverse industry domains including telecommunications, banking, manufacturing. He has an eclectic range of interests within computer industry. Currently thinks that convergence, mobility, self-adaptation and virtualization should be the focus for the IT professional.

This Special Interest Group (SIG) is run jointly through the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Computer Management Group of Australia (CMGA).

Definitions

Enterprise Capacity Management

An IT discipline and practice to ensure current and future IT infrastructure is available in a timely manner, to ensure that work is completed in acceptable time. Capacity Management is made up of Performance Management and Capacity Planning.i

Performance Management

The skill is ensuring the IT infrastructure is used in the most efficient way possibly. This includes the skills of performance reporting; load testing, response time monitoring, performance evaluation and improvement recommendations and tuning.

Capacity Planning

The art of forecasting future IT infrastructure requirements. This includes budgeting skills and skills in management presentations and reporting. A major component of this skill is the ability to estimate future response time forecasting as transactional volumes increase and server configurations are changed. The final skill is the ability to monitoring actual usage against the values that were forecasted.

CMG Australia (CMGA)

A vendor independent user group whose purpose is the dissemination of information relating to Enterprise Capacity Management.

Australian Computer Society (ACS)

The Australian Computer Society is the recognised association for Information & Communications Technology (ICT) professionals in Australia.

Maintain a repository of resources eg web sites, library and network contact list to enable members to gain access to sources of information, expertise, products and resources which will allow them to enhance their competencies.

Output