A Capacity Planner engagement should typically run for at least 30 days to ensure that it covers a complete monthly business cycle. Thirty days is considered typical since this covers a monthly business cycle where the demand for resources increases during the end-of-month or beginning-of-month processing. It is important that the Capacity Planner capture these increases. The time frame for a Capacity Planner engagement can vary depending on the size and nature of the business.

There are two types of Capacity Planner assessments: CE and CA. The CE assessment provides the sizing estimates of the current environment, while the CA assessment provides a more detailed analysis of the current environment. The CE assessment helps to demonstrate what can be achieved by virtualizing physical workloads, and the CA assessment provides guidance on how systems may be virtualized.

A Capacity Planner collector is installed in the environment that is being assessed. The collector runs as a Windows service and is configured using the VMware Capacity Planner Data Manager. The collector must be installed on a Windows machine, but inventory and performance data can be collected from both Windows and Linux/Unix servers. More than one collector may need to be installed for larger environments. A single collector can collect data from a maximum of 500 systems.

The collector or collectors discover systems in the environment and collect inventory and performance data from the systems. The inventory includes information about the installed physical hardware, operating systems, and installed software.

Performance data metrics are collected on CPU utilization, RAM utilization, disk capacity, and disk I/O. This data is then sent securely to the VMware Capacity Planner Dashboard to be analyzed.

There can be some challenges to setting up the VMware Capacity Planner. Issues with setting up the correct credentials required for data collection and configuring Windows Firewall and services to allow the data collection are common issues that may be encountered.

The following table includes the services and ports that must be open on target systems to allow the Capacity Planner collector to collect data:

In order to collect data from Windows systems, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), remote registry, and perfmon must be enabled on the target system. For data collection on Linux or Unix systems, port 22 must be open and the Secure Shell Daemon (SSHD) must be running. Account credentials provided must have at least local administrator rights on the target systems.