A Simalytic Approach to Modeling Virtualized Environments

System Virtualization allows multiple O/S images to execute on a single physical host computer. Measuring the host resource usage is straightforward, and the necessary tools are included with most virtualization environments. Complexities introduced by the different virtualization techniques create problems with measurements within the guests that impact the ability to precisely plan capacity for applications. This paper proposes a more holistic approach, using the Simalytic Modeling technique, to planning capacity needs by understanding the effect of resource usage on application performance. 1