HP Virtualization Manager and HP Capacity Advisor: an introduction

As with the simulation interval for the what-if scenarios, the date range for generating sys-
tem reports should generally be set to a point in the future. In this case, the time interval for the
report has been set to the entire month of March two years in the future. This takes the forecast
for the workloads into account. The generated report will then indicate the resource utilization
at the specified time period in the future.
The screen shown in Figure 18-19 illustrates one of the many graphs that are generated in the
resulting Capacity Advisor report. This graph shows what the sustained CPU utilization will be
for the hypothetical system during March of 2007. The maximum sustained utilization (at least
15 minutes in duration) is 92% for this hypothetical system. This means that the highest work-
load peak that will be sustained for at least 15 minutes will consume at least 92% of the hypo-
thetical system’s resource. An important distinction to understand from the sustained load graph
is that the graph doesn’t show utilization spikes that are shorter than 15 minutes in duration. In
many environments, such short spikes aren’t a concern from a capacity-planning perspective; the
sustained peaks are generally most significant. In addition to verifying that the CPU load can be
The HP Virtual Server Environment
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Figure 18-18 Capacity Advisor Scenario Report Generator