1 A Simalytic Approach to Modeling Virtualized Environments

System Virtualization allows multiple O/S images to execute on a single physical host computer. Measur-ing the host resource usage is straightforward, and the necessary tools are included with most virtualiza-tion 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 pa-per 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 Hypervisor usually implies a hardware implementation and VMM a purely software implementation but, for this paper, VMM will be used for all virtualization control programs regardless of implementation