Using the Free vKernel Capacity View

vKernel Capacity View is a tiny 1MB free application that you can install and analze your virtual infrastructure capacity in under 2 minutes. I know that 2 minutes maysound crazy but, believe me, I tried it. Let me show you how it works.

What is Capacity View?

vKernel makes a variety of virtualization management products. I learned more about them and their products directly from their CTO and Founder, Alex Bakman and CEO Doug McNary at the 2010 Boston Tech Field Day. Here are 3 of the best quotes that I pulled from their presentation:

• “Capacity Management = Performance”
• “Most virtualizaton issues are related to capacity constraints”
• “Admins may buy servers with tons of CPUand RAM but then they have IO bottlenecks – admins are constantly fighting bottleneck and capacity issues”

All of their offerings are either virtual appliances that run on your ESX server or tiny free apps that can quickly analyze your virtual infrastructure. One of their free apps is Capacity View (which could be considered a “teaser”, but a very useful teaser, for their Capacity Analyzer virtual appliance).

Simply, Capacity View is a Windows tray apliance that connects to vCenter or a direct ESX Server and pulls back

Installing and Using Capacity View?

I downloaded Capacity View from vKernel’s website (providing an email address is required). The 1MB install took less than 1 minute and it Capacity View started automatically. Once started, it prompted me for my vCenter or ESX Server credentials, as you see in the graphic below. 

From there, Capacity View quickly analyzed my infrastructure and provided the information below…

Among all the things that Capacity View told me on my small lab environment, here were some of the more interesting:

• That I can add 57 more virtual machines to my existing infrastructure (in theory)
• I have a number of over-allocated resources including excessive CPU, RAM, and Storage
• The allocation of my physical and virtual resources

• Stats on the number of datacenters, clusters, hosts, VMs, resource pools, and datastores

What is Capacity Analyzer?

While Capacity View is a simple and free tool, Capacity Analyzer is an enterprise-grade virtualization performance management that sells for $299 per socket. Capacity Analyzer runs as a virtual appliance and it can manage multiple VMware vCenter virtual infrastructures  as well as Microsoft System Center Hyper-V data centers and here is what it looks like:

 You can download the free vKernel Capacity View at this site.