HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

Data retention period
By default, data is kept on the CMS for a period of four years. The amount of time can be altered
so that it is shorter or longer than the default period. There is no upper limit on the number of years
that data can be kept; however, you are restricted by the amount of disk space available.
Procedure 2 Changing the data retention period
1. Navigate to the vseprefs.props property file in one of the following locations:
• Windows CMS: Program Files\HP\Virtual Server
Environment\vseprefs.props
• HP-UX CMS: /etc/opt/vse/vseprefs.props
2. Look for this text, and change the value for PROFILE_RETAIN_DAYS:
#
# The default number of days to retain capacity planning profile data.
#
PROFILE_RETAIN_DAYS=1460
#
For example:
365 (one year)
730 (two years)
1095 (three years)
1460 (four years, the default)
1825 (five years)
2190 (six years)
During the nightly data collection, the data service checks to see if the oldest month of data is older
than the days set for retention. If so, that month of data is deleted.
Impact of data collection on managed system performance
The data collection process is purposely designed to consume few resources on the managed
systems from which data is being collected.
For a diagram of the Capacity Advisor data collection infrastructure, see Figure 1 (page 17) .
Data collection options
When preparing to collect data for use in scenarios or for obtaining historical activity reports,
consider the following:
• The list of servers from which you want to collect data.
• The collection agency in operation on the servers (Capacity Advisor can collect data by way
of the Utilization Provider, by way of agentless means, or by import from other HP data
collection methods).
For discussions of various collection agencies, see “Comparison of agentless and UP data
collection” (page 18) and “HP ICperf data differs from Utilization Provider data” (page 19).
• Whether you need to collect data for the first time, update a data collection, or update a data
collection schedule.
Deciding from which servers to collect
Data collection via Capacity Advisor is limited to those systems recognized as servers within Systems
Insight Manager. The list of all possible servers can be viewed by opening the All Systems view
or the All Servers view in the Systems and Event Collections area on the left. The list of all possible
servers that are licensed with Matrix OE can be viewed by opening the All Matrix OE Resources
view in this same area, or by opening the Visualization tab (Tools→HP Matrix OE visualization...
from the top menu bar).
38 Procedures