VMware vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0 Release Notes

These release notes describe the following topics:

• Introducing vCenter CapacityIQ
• Key Features
• Before You Begin
• Known Issues

Introducing vCenter CapacityIQ

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is a capacity management and planning tool for VMware Infrastructure environments. CapacityIQ helps you:

• Eliminate waste by identifying any unused or over-allocated capacity
• Reduce operational overhead by automating routine capacity monitoring and management tasks
• Minimize business risk of outages or failures resulting from capacity bottlenecks and shortfalls

CapacityIQ supports VirtualCenter 2.5, Update 4 and Update 5, managing hosts running ESX Server 3.0.2 through 3.5. CapacityIQ 1.0 does not support VMware vSphere 4.0 or vCenter 4.0.

Key Features

This section describes the key features available in CapacityIQ 1.0.

Capacity Awareness

• View and analyze past, present, and future capacity states at-a-glance with dashboard graphs and tables.
• Eliminate costly routine monitoring and management tasks through automation using customized capacity thresholds and alerts.

Capacity Optimization

• Reclaim excess capacity from idle, oversized, or powered-off virtual machines.
• Size and allocate capacity for each virtual machine based on historical and future needs.
• Place virtual machines in the most optimal clusters to eliminate further waste.

Capacity Prediction

• Simulate one-time business events to quantify potential business impact.
• Identify the timing of potential capacity shortfalls based on trends and forecasts.
• Purchase and provision capacity as and when needed.

Before You Begin

When you are ready to install CapacityIQ, apply the full version of the CapacityIQ license. See the VMware license portal for details.

You must have CapacityIQ privileges assigned to your VI Client role by a VirtualCenter administrator before you can start using CapacityIQ.

Known Issues

The following are known issues in this release.

Issues with Time

• It takes an hour or two for information associated with the following events to appear in the user interface.
  • It can take up to two hours after a new host is added in Virtual Center for the host to be considered in capacity estimates.
  • After installation, it takes 40 minutes or more for inventory information to appear in the user interface.


• If you make changes in a cluster, such as moving a host out of the cluster and then moving it back again, and then create a what-if scenario, it might take two or three hours for the change to be reflected in the what-if scenario.
  There is no workaround at this time.


• If a dashboard or view is open for more than an hour, the dashboard or view should be refreshed.
  Click the selected object in the inventory panel to get the latest data.


• Rendering time for certain views might be noticeably slow.
  This might happen when a cluster is selected in the inventory panel, or when the selected object contains over 500 virtual machines. In these cases, the following views can take up to a minute to render in the user interface:
  
  • Powered-Off Virtual Machines
  • Idle Virtual Machines
  • Oversized Virtual Machines

  Note: These views are also available in report form under the Reports tab. These reports can be started and processed in the background.

• CapacityIQ uses only the Gregorian calendar to derive dates from stored time stamps of collected data.
  There is no workaround at this time.

How Information Appears in the User Interface

• If you remove a host or virtual machine and then add the host or virtual machine back, the data you collected prior to removal cannot be reconciled with data that is collected after you add the resource back into the virtual datacenter.
  There is no workaround at this time.


• The data in the pie chart on the Common Virtual Machine Configurations - Distribution view might not display properly if you change the Capacity Calculation Rules in Capacity and Trend Analysis global settings.
  The default Capacity Calculation Rules setting is Use last known capacity per interval. If you change the setting to Use average capacity per interval, the pie chart could be missing data. The information that does appear is counts of the unique virtual machine configurations observed within the analysis period, rather than the average or last known configurations.
  There is no workaround at this time.


• In the Virtual Machine Capacity Usage - Trend view, the CPU Limit trending line can show a greater value than the Configured CPU trending line.
  This information might appear to be in error, but CapacityIQ allows the CPU Limit to be set higher than the configured CPU. Configured CPU is calculated as vCPU count x host CPU speed per core.


• Trend views might mishandle the display of information on the view page.
  If you use a computer with the screen resolution set smaller than 1024 x 768, the text string that appears below the Data Window bar might be truncated.
  Workaround: Change the screen resolution to a higher resolution when working with trend views.


• What-if analysis cannot be performed on a new standalone host that VI Client has not finished adding to inventory.
  Workaround: Links for applying what-if scenarios to the host, either in the dashboard or in views, do not appear until an hour or two after the host has been added to VI Client.


• If CapacityIQ performs a shutdown that was not initiated through the ciq-admin command-line, the Admin Portal might not show that the VirtualCenter connection status is disconnected.
  The status updates when you restart CapacityIQ.


• Changes to a user's roles and permissions in VI Client might result in a mismatched view of objects between the VI Client inventory panel and the CapacityIQ inventory panel.
  Workaround: Press F5 to refresh the view.


• When certain objects are selected in the inventory panel, they might appear to have clickable child objects, but this is not the case
  The affected object types are:
  • Hosts and clusters with only folders
  • A datacenter with only folders
  • A cluster with only resource pools
  • A host with only resource pools

  There is no workaround at this time.

• If you click Combine/Compare while a what-if scenario is being applied, the scenario is not applied to the view.
  Workaround: Wait for the scenario application to complete before clicking Combine/Compare.


• On the Virtual Machine Capacity - Summary view, it is possible to see values, such as Time Remaining > 1 year, even though the Total Capacity, Avg. Deployed, and Remaining values are null.
  This occurs only within the first two hours after an object is added.

Miscellaneous Issues

• If you have Internet Explorer 8 installed, you might notice anomalies in the user interface, such as unexpected fonts or misaligned text boxes.
  There is no workaround at this time.


• When applying an update, the update file in c:\temp shows \fakepath\ in the file path.
  There is no fakepath directory. This string might appear if you are using Internet Explorer 8 and will not affect the success of the update.


• If you apply an update manually using the ciq-admin command-line interface, the build number in the Admin Portal header might not match the build number shown on the Status page under CapacityIQ vApp Info.
  Press F5 to refresh the Admin Portal.


• If the network connection between VirtualCenter and the CapacityIQ host is slow, data collection might timeout after three minutes.
  Workaround: Edit the following file to update the timeout setting manually:

  /usr/lib/tomcat-ciq/webapps/cm/WEB-INF/classes/ciq.properties

  Set a new value in milliseconds for the vcSocketTimeout property. For example, enter vcSocketTimeout=300000 to set the timeout to occur after five minutes. Restart CapacityIQ after saving your changes.

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