Cloud Management - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 108

configuration. Starting from the design and planning phase, the capacity required to ful-
fill the service-level agreements must be taken into consideration and incorporated into
configurations. When the required configurations are documented and designed, a base-
line can be established to serve as the standard against which all capacity changes can be
compared and monitored to understand current and future capacity requirements based
on perceived trends.
The process involves the development of a capacity management plan that will highlight
how to keep up with current demands and scale to future ones. The plan has the following
objectives:
■ Provide guidance and advice to IT personnel as well as to the rest of the organization
on all performance- and capacity-related concerns.
■ Evaluate the extent and impact of any changes on the capacity and performance of IT
assets and services.
■ Assist with the root-cause analysis and resolution of any capacity- and performance-
related issues.
■ Ensure that service meets or exceeds all the agreed-upon performance and capacity tar-
gets by managing them properly for both resources and services.
■ Ensure that the current and future capacity and performance demands in relation to IT
services are met within expected costs.
■ Ensure that all planned performance and capacity optimizations and enhancements are
implemented and executed properly.
During the development of the capacity management plan, all resources, including
human resources, should be taken into consideration, especially the technical capabilities of
the people implementing the changes. If these capabilities are lacking, sufficient measures
have to be taken, such as further training or hiring external expert manpower as a tempo-
rary solution while the primary team is training (the latter depends on whether the budget
allows the hiring of third-party consultants).
There are two important activities in capacity management that ensure that all service
levels are adequately met:
Monitoring for Changes Capacity management is still closely tied to change manage-
ment, and in fact it ties into all of the IT service management processes discussed in this
chapter. The capacity management team has to be ever wary and critical of any proposed
changes because service delivery and customer satisfaction are its main goals and any
change that causes major disruption should be reevaluated and its approach altered. The
capacity manager or the stakeholder in charge of capacity management should be the most
critical member of the change advisory board (CAB).
Capacity management should be closely aligned with configuration management because
the capacity and performance of any IT asset depends mostly on its configuration. It will
also help to better understand the interdependencies and relationships between assets,
which might highlight possible optimization points within the system to increase capacity
and performance.