Tools I Use - PowerRecon (3.1) - Planning Edition

I have been through a "VMware Virtualization Assessment" from VMWare and frankly wasn't that impressed. We had some very specific questions around capacity planning and Disk I/O that were not captured. I can see the value in this offering for a shop trying to get into virtualization, but in a mature IT shop with very specific questions not, general "fit" it didn't work well. So, when it came time to virtualize one of our DataCenters from an acquisition, another tool was in order. We had around 50-60 workloads to consolidate and a Clariion CX3/40 already on site. So, our big questions were: How many hosts and how fast of disk? Something I've found with many of the third party management tools around virutalization is a certain lack of maturity. PowerRecon was no different. In planning I had created a database on a shared SQL2005 server and an account with dbo rights to only the database I wanted to use. But, this didn't work. PowerRecon wants full rights on the SQL server to create it's own databases, you can scale back those rights later though. The inventory went fairly well with only one email/call to PlateSpin support for a group of problem servers. This was fixed by changing the credentials that the service started as to a Domain Admin account. Once again, a bit lacking in maturity of a product to only grant appropriate security to part that need it. You can use alternate credentials to connect/inventory/monitor, but this didn't seem to work perfectly. Once you get through these steps the rest is easy. Well it's easy if your the patient type which I'm not. Even though I really needed 20-30 days of monitoring to see some trends, I still wanted to peek at the results daily. It's pretty interesting to see the data fill in. Reporting was pretty straight forward and I customized some of the reports with ease to export and plan disk sizing. The two questions were answered very well in number of host, memory was the constraint. In disk, there were 2 very clear levels. Our SQL & File Servers were heavy on I/O and everything else was not. So FC for the SQL & File Servers and SATA for everything else. One thing that could be improved for the capacity planning tool would be the ability to plan around IOPS not just MB/Sec. I was able to get the information I wanted in IOPS from the reports, but could only run scenarios based on MB/Sec. Would I use this product again? Certainly so. I purchased enough monitoring days to have a pad to use on other virtualization projects around the enterprise. Would I buy this product in the PowerRecon Standard Edition with Planning packaging? I don't know. The price point on it seems comparable with the other products on the market that are generating a lot of buzz. I'm also currently evaluating vCharter Pro from Vizioncore and Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance from VKernel.