Capacity Planning using EPV for Unix and Windows

Mark Cohen Austrowiek
June 2004

Many papers have been written on Unix and Windows performance in the last years providing essential information as resource thresholds, hardware functionality, capacity planning, system and database tuning, measurement tools and much more.

It still seems to us with all that knowledge we still are having problems performing capacity management activities naturally. Naturally means adopting a methodology that fits your organisation not the one required to make some product work.

Systems have different roles in the organisation; applications peaks at different times, workloads can be very stable or extremely unpredictable so your Capacity Management methodology and tools have to be flexible to allow you to manage this complexity.

Problems such as resource sharing, missing capacity indicators and the vast amount of existing systems are still causing us to loose control of the situation.

In this paper we’ll explain a simple natural methodology implemented at customer sites to perform capacity planning activities using the standard reports provided by the EPV for Unix and EPV for Windows products.