Patent ID: 8738333

Claim:
A method of simulating a capacity and/or load model in a virtualized environment for a capacity container, which method comprises: creating a capacity and/or load model; collecting existing server and virtual machine (VM) attributes for the capacity container, which attributes include measures of capacity utilization; providing a first and second set of historical data for each of a user-selected number of user-selected time intervals prior to and ending at a predetermined time wherein: (a) data for the first set in each interval comprises a measure of total capacity in the capacity container in units which are a measure of the number of VMs that can be deployed in the capacity container, wherein the measure of the number of VMs that can be deployed is the number of average virtual machine (AVM) units that can be deployed in the capacity container, and wherein the number of AVM units that can be deployed is determined by dividing a total available CPU demand capacity by a CPU demand of the AVM units and dividing a total available memory capacity by a memory consumption of the AVM units, and utilizing the smaller of the two divisions, and (b) data for the second set in each interval comprises a measure of total capacity utilization in the capacity container in units which are a measure of the number of VMs that cause the capacity utilization in the capacity container, wherein the measure of the number of VMs that cause utilization is the number of AVM units that cause the utilization in the capacity container, and wherein the number of AVM units that cause the utilization is determined by dividing total CPU demand by the CPU demand of the AVM units, dividing total memory consumption by the memory consumption of the AVM units, and utilizing the smaller of the two divisions; fitting the first and second sets of historical data to provide a first and a second trend curve; and visualizing the first and second trend curves.