Plans: looking to the future

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Plan page

Use the Plan Page to run simulations for what-if scenarios that explore possibilities such as:

  • Reducing cost while assuring performance for your workloads

  • Impact of scaling resources

  • Changing hardware supply

  • Projected infrastructure requirements

  • Optimal workload distribution to meet historical peaks demands

  • Optimal workload distribution across existing resources

How Plans work

To run a plan scenario, Turbonomic creates a snapshot copy of your real-time market and modifies that snapshot according to the scenario. It then uses the Economic Scheduling Engine to perform analysis on that plan market. A scenario can modify the snapshot market by changing the workload, adding or removing hardware resources, or eliminating constraints such as cluster boundaries or placement policies.

As it runs a plan, Turbonomic continuously analyzes the plan market until it arrives at the optimal conditions that market can achieve. When it reaches that point, the Economic Scheduling Engine cannot find better prices for any of the resources demanded by the workload — the plan stops running, and it displays the results as the plan's desired state. The display includes the resulting workload distribution across hosts and datastores, as well as a list of actions the plan executed to achieve the desired result.

For example, assume a scenario that adds virtual machines to a cluster. To run the plan, Turbonomic takes a snapshot of the current market, and adds the VMs to the specified cluster. Turbonomic then runs analysis on the plan market, where each entity in the supply chain shops for the resources it needs, always looking for a better price — looking for those resources from less-utilized suppliers. This analysis continues until all the resources are provided at the best possible price.

The results might show that you can add more workload to your environment, even if you reduce compute resources by suspending physical machines. The recommended actions would then indicate which hosts you can take offline, and how to distribute your virtual machines among the remaining hosts.

Plans are retained for 14 days by default. To update the retention period, go to Settings > Maintenance > Data Retention.

Idle workloads

Plans calculate optimal placement and optimal resource allocation for the given workload. However, plans do not include idle workloads. This is because an idle VM shows no utilization, so the plan cannot determine optimal placement or what percentage of allocated resources that workload will require when it restarts.