HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

2 Features
Capacity Advisor lets you test configuration changes before actually making them in your data
center, and helps you to manage existing resources to improve their utilization. For example,
Capacity Advisor assists you in answering questions such as the following:
• Is there room on this system to support additional work?
• Will this workload fit on this system?
• Can these servers be consolidated as virtual machines on a single server?
• What might my resource demand be in six months or a year?
• What are the estimated power costs for cooling a real or simulated system configuration?
• What does a comparison of several “what-if” scenarios reveal about the analyzed alternatives?
• What is the historic behavior of a system or workload?
Capacity Advisor can display data about the following system resources:
• CPU cores (number) and speed
• Memory
• Network I/O bandwidth
• Disk I/O bandwidth
• Power usage
Capacity Advisor enables you to collect resource data and create visualization graphs with the
following views:
• Historical utilization and trends
• Data peaks
• Peak durations
• Forecasts
with the following utilization limits:
• Amount of acceptable resource usage
• Sustained time
• Percentage of time
Capacity Advisor enables you to create scenarios for “what-if” planning and forecasting, performing
tasks such as the following:
• For systems in scenarios:
Create systems based on existing systems or with characteristics that you define◦
◦ Remove systems
◦ Edit system attributes
◦ Turn systems into virtual machines
◦ Move virtual machines
• For workloads in scenarios:
Create workloads based on existing workloads or with characteristics that you define◦
◦ Collect utilization data for workloads
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