ITIL and capacity planning?

[Mott Given]

Is anyone using ITIL standards as a framework for their capacity management and performance tuning on HP servers? If so, what are the pros and cons of doing these tasks under ITIL?

Mott

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

ITIL is just a set of guidelines and does not specify how you configure or plan your environment. Capacity and performance are very relative concepts from one IT shop to another. For instance, you can not expect a mom'n'pop shop type business capacity planning to be the same as that of a fortune 500 company. Their growth rates alone warrant a different set of rules to be used.

If somebody is trying to push ITIL as a set of rules, question this person's understanding of the ITIL concept. ITIL does not go into specifics, such as performance tuning or capacity planning. It may say something like, "when you are planning your capacity, take the next 10 years into consideration rather than next 2" but that should be it. You, as the admin of the system, talking to the business owners, who will utilize this system are the final yay or nay sayers, how much you environment will grow.

I am not a big proponent of people taking ITIL as the bible and try to follow it word by word and still not grasping the nature of the document. Again, this is a guideline not a set of rules.

My 2 cents.

[Rick Garland]

ITIL is a set of best practices for a wide range of subjects and tasks. All of these are generializations. They include capacity planning, network services, system install and configuration, application installation and configuration, the hiring and training of IT personnel, their roles and tasks, etc. Include the format of the documentation that would accompany all of these subjects as well.

By no means is this list exhaustive.

By no means does every company have to have the same items in their documents.

In general, the way I see ITIL is the documentation of best practices for the tasks that you believe could be most important.