Today i had a quick look at capacity iq

What does it do ?

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is a value-add component of the VMware vCenter family of management solutions, providing capacity management capabilities for virtualized datacenter or desktop environments. CapacityIQ integrates seamlessly with VMware vCenter Server, ensuring that your virtualized infrastructure capacity is always predictable and efficiently used.  Such as

  • Perform “What-If” Impact Analysis to Model Effect of Capacity Changes
  • Identify and Reclaim Inefficient, Unused Capacity
  • Forecast Timing of Capacity Shortfalls and Bottlenecks

More info here

Prerequisites

First thing to tell is that there is a great pdf called vCenter CapacityIQ evaluators guide which tell already everything you need to know. Most important thing to say is that it will not change anything in your virtualcenter environment such as logging settings or whatsoever, so it can be “easily” tested.

Getting started.

capacityIQ is available as an ovf file. So download the ovf file and import it in virtualcenter. (you’ll need 110 gb space on your datastore)

once its imported you have an powered off virtual machine which will look like this.

when you power it on you have to provide a root password and a ciqadmin password

after that it will take a couple of minutes to configure itself you will get the following screen where you can configure the time zone and network settings.

Configuring

after importing and configuring the “appliance” you can do more configuring by going to the url and log in with the username: ciqadmin

most important thing you have to do is registering the appliance with the virtualcenter server. so click register and fill in the necessary information.

you will see the following screen

in virtualcenter you will see the following tasks

at the end the appliance is registered. last thing to do is to install the vi client plug-in and restart your vi client.

in vi client you will have a new icon capacityIQ

sample report

you can do really great things and create a lot of reports for inventory, trend analyses and more. click here for a example report