HP Virtualization Manager and HP Capacity Advisor: an introduction

workload consolidation. In the consolidation example, three workloads running in separate
nPartitions are evaluated to determine whether a single nPartition with fewer total resources is
able to host the workloads. The goal of the scenario is to reduce the hardware necessary for the
workloads while increasing resource utilization.
It should be noted this chapter was written using prototypes of the Capacity Advisor. The
screens shown in this chapter will vary slightly from the final product.
Capacity Advisor Overview
Capacity Advisor is a component of the VSE Management Software as described in Chapter 17,
“VSE Virtualization Manager.” The Capacity Advisor tool collects workload utilization data for
every workload in the enterprise data center. This data is collected on a daily basis from each sys-
tem and is stored on the HP Systems Insight Manager CMS. The collected workload utilization
data is referred to as a workload’s historic profile.
A workload’s historic profile is its resource consumption history. This information consists
of historic metrics for CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network I/O utilization. Reports and graphs
are available for each metric in the workload’s historic profile. In addition to generating reports
and graphs, a historic profile can be edited using the Historic Profile Editor.
The historic profile editor can be used to mark data points as invalid in a workload’s historic
profile. Atypical events occur in computing environments that skew the actual resource re-
quirements for a workload. For example, an intermittent hardware failure can cause an application
to require unnecessary retries and thus record unusually high utilization metrics. For these
events, the historic profile editor in Capacity Advisor can be used to invalidate the unusually
high data points. The unwanted data points can be invalidated according to a given date range
or it can discard values above a certain threshold.
After ensuring that the historic profile accurately reflects the nature of the workload, the next
step is editing the workload’s forecast. A forecast is an extrapolation of the baseline data into
the future. Forecasting allows growth trends to be input in order to adjust for expected increases
in resource requirements. In situations where the resource requirements for a workload are ex-
pected to change, the forecast editor allows the forecast for a workload to be modified. For ex-
ample, if a workload is expected to grow 10% over the next 12 months, the forecast editor can
be used to scale the workload accordingly.
As part of editing the workload’s forecast, the workload’s baseline can also be tailored. A base-
line is a workload’s resource utilization blueprint based on its historic profile. One way to cre-
ate a baseline is to select a specific day in the workload’s history as the representative sample to
be used for planning purposes. Workloads that have daily repeating usage patterns such as backup
systems are candidates for this type of baseline. Another way is to create a baseline from an ar-
bitrary period of historic data. Workloads that are cyclical on a weekly basis are best modeled with
this type of baseline. Several more options exist for creating baselines. It is important to re-
member that baselines should be created using the appropriate dataset for the workload. Only
baselines that accurately reflect the business’s use model of the workload are useful for
capacity-planning purposes.
The HP Virtual Server Environment
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