The July 2022 drop of vROps Cloud brought all sorts of goodness: Synthetic Monitoring, Automation Central Updates, Rule-Based Application Discovery, and more. Formal Release Notes can be found here. One of my favorite new features is Business Hours.
Yes, we can now do capacity planning and rightsizing based on a schedule. If you recall, we had three options before the introduction of the Business Hours Schedule.
Conservative - time remaining is based on the upper bound projection and represents the time remaining before the projected upper bound crosses the usable capacity threshold. Nice blog on it here from VMware Senior Staff Technical Marketing Manager Brandon Gordon.
Aggressive - time remaining is based on the mean projection and represents the time remaining before the projected mean crosses the usable capacity threshold. Nice blog on it here from VMware Senior Staff Technical Marketing Manager Brandon Gordon.
Peak focused - this option uses the upper range of the data. The projection will be based on the high utilization points.
For years, customers have asked for the ability to do capacity planning and rightsizing exercises during certain hours, with the ability to ignore after hours spikes. Business Hours, which is available in vROps Cloud only at this point, gives us the ability to define Business Hours on groups of VMs or Clusters. Here's how it works.
If you'd like to define Business Hours for your entire environment, that's easy, just adjust in your Default Policy. Go to Configure - Policies - select your Active Default Policy - EDIT POLICY - select the Capacity tile - click the padlock for Business Hours.
I've adjusted my Business Hours to be 6 AM to 6 PM. Notice you still have the Time Remaining capabilities up above, you can still be conservative, aggressive, or peak focused within your newly defined Business Hours.
Now, what if we want to leave our Default Policy as-is and define a new Policies for VMs we want to analyze just during Business Hours? Let's start by creating a Custom Group for the Business Hours VMs. Go to Environment - Custom Groups - ADD to define your group. Once complete, let's create a Policy (clone it from the Default) which we will configure Business Hours on and point it at our new Custom Group.
Go to Configure - Policies - ADD and create a new Policy (inherit from Default).
Now that it's created, you'll have the tiles.
Let's set the Business Hours via the Capacity tile. In this case, we'll say 6 AM - 6 PM are the Business Hours.
Next, we'll assign this new Business Hours Policy to the Custom Group we created previously. Click the Groups and Objects tile.
Select your Custom Group, which will also show you the included VMs. Click SAVE. Back at Policies you will now see your new Policy, which defines the Business Hours VMs and the hours on which capacity projections and rightsizing recommendations will be made.
I am now analyzing Capacity and performing Rightsizing during Business Hours on this group of VMs. Note that each Policy can have its own Business Hours schedule.
For more information on everything that was included in the July release of vROps Cloud, check out this blog!