Projection plans calculate infrastructure requirements into the future, so your environment can accommodate changes to workload requirements over time. In a single plan you can specify the scope of the plan, how far into the future to project, and by what increments of time. For example, you can project the requirements of a specific datacenter one year into the future, showing how requirements change at one-month intervals.
When you run a projection plan, Operations Manager executes the plan iteratively for each time period you’re projecting for. For example, assume you set up a projection plan as follows:
- Project for three months at one-month intervals
- Set a 15% increase of workload as the baseline
- Specify Demand settings to:
- Add VMs based on previous month
- Add 10 copies of a specific VM every month
When you run this plan, it will execute three steps, one for each one-month interval. For each step, the plan will: increase the current workload by 15%, add the same VMs that were added the month before the plan was run, and add 10 copies of the specified VM.
Enable projection in the Configure panel. This opens the Projection dialog box where you can enable or disable projection, and set up the projection time periods.
The start date for projection is always now — the time that you run the plan. In other words, the plan loads you current environment into memory when you click the Run button.
End Date specifies how far into the future you will project, and Monthly Frequency specifies how much time to assign each projection step. Frequency is always a factor of the number of months in the projection time range. For example:
- 6-month range: divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 6
- 9-month range: divisible by 1, 3, and 9
- 11-month range: divisible by 1 and 11