HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

Data modeling for VSP vPars and VMs
Most systems fit in the two models, everything is dedicated, or everything is shared except sometimes
memory.
VSP vParVMOriginal vParnParPhysical
PrivateSharedPrivatePrivatePrivateCPU
PrivateMixedPrivatePrivatePrivateMemory
SharedSharedPrivatePrivatePrivateNICs
SharedSharedPrivatePrivatePrivateHBAs
HP Integrity VSP (Virtualization Services Platform) vPars have dedicated CPUs and memory, but
share IO bandwidth. The Capacity Advisor Scenario Editor does not have the capability to properly
model all VSP vPars.
VSP 6.0
Capacity Advisor properly models VSP 6.0 VMs.
VSP 6.1
In VSP 6.1 a server can host either VMs or vPars, but not both at once. Capacity Advisor treats
VSP 6.1 vPars like the original vPars. This is not a complete model and the VSP host could be an
IO bottleneck. Since Capacity Advisor does not show any data about vPar hosts there is no place
to look for this bottleneck.
VSP 6.2
In VSP 6.2, both VMs and vPars can run on one host at the same time. In this case Capacity Advisor
models the vPars as VMs. While this is correct for IO and memory, there may be spare CPU
capacity in a vPar interpreted as being available to the VMs. Capacity Advisor may show there
is enough CPU capacity in the VSP host, but it could be that the VMs are not able to get all the
CPU resources needed if the vPars are allocated more cores than they fully use. As a result of this
modeling issue, Capacity Advisor 7.2 does not claim to support using VSP 6.2 vPars in the Scenario
Editor. Capacity Advisor will collect utilization data from VSP VMs and vPars, and you can view
this data in the Profile Viewer. The Capacity Analysis dashboard will still work with VSP VMs and
vPars.
It is possible to work around the modeling issue. A VSP 6.2 host with VMs and vPars can be
included in the Scenario Editor. You can also create a what-if VSP host by creating an Integrity
VM host. What-if VMs and vPars can be created as VMs. Once you have built the desired
configuration, check it for bottlenecks:
1. Check that none of the VMs, vPars, or the host are exceeding their utilization limits. The
scenario editor notes issues with red utilization bars.
2. In a copy of the scenario, delete all the vPars and reduce the number of cores on the host by
the total number of cores allocated to the vPars. In this new scenario, check that the VSP host
does not have a CPU bottleneck.
Some VSP hosts will not have any data collected because Capacity Advisor does not collect data
from vPar hosts. This prevents Capacity Advisor from making an automatic estimate of the IO
capacity of the host. You must manually enter your estimate of the network and disk bandwidth
capacity for some VSP 6.2 hosts that you bring into a scenario.
Data modeling in the Scenario Editor 155