HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

Prerequisites
• You must have already collected data on the systems of interest (see “Gathering data for
Capacity Advisor” (page 37)).
• You should be familiar with Capacity Advisor operations (see “Procedures” (page 37)).
• You must be logged in to Matrix Operating Environment (see “Accessing Capacity Advisor”
(page 37)).
For specific descriptions of each field shown on the user interface screens, click the on the screen.
Table 21 Checklist — Consolidating server loads onto a virtual machine manually
Related Procedure(s)Task
• “Creating a consolidation candidates report” (page 54)
Determine which systems to consolidate (both to
and from).
• “Creating a planning scenario” (page 65)
Create a planning scenario.
• “Creating an historic utilization report” (page 51)
• “Creating a cost allocation report” (page 55)
Run reports on the scenario systems.
(Include this step if you want to obtain a baseline
set of reports to compare your scenario changes
against.) See also “Task: Understand current
resource usage” (page 131).
• “Creating a system” (page 72) or “Adding an existing
system” (page 73)
• “Editing a system” (page 74)
• “Changing servers to be VMs (manually)” (page 75)
• “Setting global utilization limits” (page 58)
Edit the scenario copy:
• Set up the new VM host system.
• Modify resources on systems as needed.
• Make each system to be consolidated become
a VM.
• Modify utilization limits, if desired.
• “Creating a scenario utilization report” (page 52)
Evaluate new quality of service.
• “Creating a cost allocation report” (page 55)
Estimate new cost allocation on the VM host.
Example consolidation: Stacking applications on an existing server
This example demonstrates how Capacity Advisor can be used to simulate converting physical
servers to virtual machines, and to then stack those VMs onto one VM host.
Assume that you have a set of legacy servers that currently support one application each. There
is good data on resource utilization for each of these servers, and it is time to see if converting
these application servers into VMs and then consolidating the VMs onto fewer VM hosts can free
up resources for other uses. For purposes of this example, it is assumed that the applications will
each run in their own virtual machine.
This task requires a profound knowledge about the systems.
• What are the licensing requirements for the applications?
• Who owns each of the systems and, if they are owned by different organizations, are they
agreeable to the consolidation?
• What are the security requirements?
• What are the networking requirements (LAN and WAN)?
• Are there Storage Area Network (SAN) requirements?
• How stable are the applications? All of them should be test and development systems or
production systems.
This list is illustrative; other questions may need to be answered for your particular environment.
The steps referenced in the following titles are from the checklist in Table 21 (page 132).
132 Planning with Capacity Advisor