Hooked with a Non-Linear Curve – VMTurbo’s Economic Approach

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

As a long-time capacity planner, if you show me a non-linear curve with a real model behind it I’ll tend to bite. Predictive analysis alone would have been enough to get my attention, but VMTurbo also talks about optimizing IT from an economics perspective. I spent a lot of years convincing and cajoling folks that capacity planning and infrastructure optimization is basically about investing your money effectively while ensuring the resulting system is efficiently utilized.

It is invigorating to see an experienced team (folks with a SMARTS heritage) approach virtualized IT environments as an economic system with calculable trade-offs and optimizable peformance-cost curves. We are told this approach works for both real-time optimizing operational control and for forward planning exercises.

It does leave me wondering if virtualized applications and resources are fully rational economic agents. By not having a true “view” of the physical world, perhaps they might obey a virtual kind of irrational “behavioral economics” (e.g. influenced by memory ballooning, virtual clock cycles, virtualized IO…)?

In any case it’s not too early to begin thinking about VMworld 2012 coming up in August. There is so much going on that one needs to have a hit list for whose booths to make sure to search out first –  high on my list this year is VMTurbo.

…(read the full post)