HP Virtualization Manager and HP Capacity Advisor: an introduction

Summary
The Capacity Advisor component of the VSE management suite provides the data, tools, and re-
ports necessary to make informed decisions regarding workload placement, migration, and con-
solidation. Using this product, capacity planners are able to analyze each workload’s utilization
profile. With data in hand, they can create baselines as the foundation for performing what-if sce-
narios. The baseline can be finely tuned to accurately represent the nature of the workloads,
which creates more accurate representations of the workload’s resource requirements. Specific
workloads may require that you build elaborate recurrences into the baseline, such as peaks on
a biweekly basis, in order to reflect the nature of workloads. After adjusting the baseline, you
can build a forecast to extrapolate the workload’s resource requirements into the future. This fore-
cast can be adjusted based on expected changes in the workload’s resource requirements.
After going through the baseline and forecast modification steps, you can create capacity-
planning scenarios as a test bed for evaluating workload consolidations, migrations, or place-
ments. These scenarios allow what-if experiments to be performed on both real and hypothetical
workloads and systems. These experiments provide an accurate preview of the expected resource
utilization because they are based on actual workload utilization metrics.
Capacity Advisor is a crucial component of HP’s Virtual Server Environment. It allows capacity
planners to more fully utilize the existing resources in the datacenter and provide assistance
when placing new workloads or performing workload consolidation. These steps are tradition-
ally difficult to perform and require extensive manual data collection and manipulation. Using
Capacity Advisor takes the manual steps out of the process and allows capacity planners to focus
on planning the datacenter.
The HP Virtual Server Environment
462