HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

Capacity Advisor gives you insight into the current power cap for HP systems that have these
options available and operating. Within Capacity Advisor, you can generate a power report to
see historic power usage data that includes power cap settings and estimated enforcement time.
The following image shows an example of the power cap data included in a Capacity Advisor
power report.
The power caps settings shown are provided by the administrator who is managing power
consumption of servers. Capacity Advisor obtains these settings and the enforcement data for
reporting purposes from Insight Control power management. For information on how to generate
a Capacity Advisor report that includes power usage data, see “Producing graphs and reports”
(page 46).
Automating solution generation: HP Smart Solver
HP Smart Solver: Types of solutions
These planning scenario simulations can be automated:
Consolidation to virtual machines
You can simulate the consolidation of existing physical systems into virtualized resources, thereby
converting the physical systems into VM guests hosted on VM hosts. To create the simulation, you
can use data from existing VM hosts or create template-generated “what-if ” systems based on
characteristics that you specify. This feature makes it possible for you simulate a replacement or
upgrade of existing legacy systems to fewer systems hosting virtual machines.
Workload stacking
You can simulate stacking individual workloads onto existing servers and/or onto template-generated
“what-if” systems based on characteristics that you specify. This facility allows you to consolidate
existing workloads into as few systems as possible.
Load balancing
You can simulate balancing system loads across several servers, virtual machines, or virtual machine
clusters, such that workloads are distributed evenly across a set of resources, without overloading
the subset of the servers.
Determining trends in Capacity Advisor
Determining trends from collected utilization data can be a challenging task. Accurate trend analysis
requires adequate historical data and an understanding of the cyclic nature of the data being
analyzed as well as any special events that might be found in the historical data.
32 Key Capacity Advisor concepts