Many organizations want to be able to optimize their capacity better, and to assess risks in their data centers based on their varying business needs.

Organizations might have varying business needs across their production, test/development, and infrastructure IT environments. For example, in production environments, businesses might want to optimize for performance, but in test/development environments, businesses might want to optimize for higher density.

If you adopt a demand based policy, the capacity planning engine will only consider the resources that are actually being used, or demanded, as consumed. So, if your 2x vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB disk VM is only using 0.5 vCPU, 1.2 GB RAM, and 4 GB disk space, the remaining resources are reported as having some capacity still available.

The following VMware Management Policies contain settings that monitor for demand and allocation models:

• VMware Production Policy (Demand only): Optimized for production loads, without using allocation limits, to obtain the most capacity
• VMware Production Policy (with Allocation): Optimized for production loads that require the demand and allocation capacity models
• VMware Production Policy (without Allocation): Optimized for production loads that require demand capacity models, and provides the highest overcommit without contention
• VMware Test and Dev Policy (without Allocation): Optimized for Dev and test environments to maximize capacity without causing significant contention, because it does not include capacity planning at the virtual machine level

We will be discussing policies again later in this chapter.