MANAGING FOR GROWTH IN A VM ENVIRONMENT

IBM Watson Research has one of the worlds largest VM/CMS installations for end user computing, i.e. the user community generates all the workload. Good capacity planning is necessary to provide the computer resources that people need along with excellent service. However, forecasting for thousands of individual users is difficult. This paper describes the capacity planning process used at Watson. This process has been successful in providing the computer capacity needed by the Watson user community because if s primary focus is on the business decisions of capacity planning, not the technical decisions.