HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

When a virtual machine is running HP-UX 11.23, most built-in commands such as top and sar
will not be aware of the dynamic memory feature and can show memory sizes that are different
from what is recorded by Capacity Advisor. For example, if a virtual machine is initially booted
with 16 GB of memory, and is then re-sized to 4 GB, the built-in commands will not know about
the change and will show 16 GB for physical RAM. Capacity Advisor, however, will show that
the available memory for the VM is 4 GB. Also, when a virtual machine is sized less than its
maximum size, some built-in commands will show the kernel using more memory than it is actually
using.
Producing graphs and reports
Capacity Advisor can generate both graphical and tabular data for presentation in either a report
format or within an adjustable profile viewer.
Using the Profile Viewer
A profile viewer provides a quick summary of historical resource utilization, presenting data
graphically as well as in tabular summaries. See also “Profile Viewer Screen” in Capacity Advisor
Help for specific descriptions of the screen functions.
A profile viewer can be accessed from the system meters on the Visualization tab, the Optimize
menu, or from the meters or menu selections on the Edit Scenario tabs in Capacity Advisor.
NOTE: A Matrix OE Visualization memory meter indicates the total memory in use — including
memory used by the kernel and the disk buffer cache.
In Capacity Advisor Profile Viewer, however, only the total memory needed by applications, rather
than what is used, is graphed (both Linux and HP-UX will fill all of unused memory with a disk
buffer cache). The memory used by the kernel and the disk buffer cache is excluded. The idea here
is that when simulating capacity for planning purposes, where you stack multiple workloads on a
single system, you would not want to include the kernel and disk buffer cache more than once in
your memory calculation.
A profile viewer opened from the Visualization tab generally displays the resource utilization data
collected from a real node in your environment.
However, for non-OS node types such as an enclosure, a complex, or a vpar monitor, which do
not have an operating system (OS) or hypervisor from which to collect actual resource utilization
data, a profile viewer calculates the utilization profile by aggregating the actual data from all of
the associated child nodes (blades, nPartitions, or vPartitions, respectively).
A profile viewer opened from the scenario editor, on the other hand, always aggregates data from
all of the workloads on a system or from all of the virtual machines (VM) running on a VM host
when the VMs are included in the scenario. This is true even when there is actual data collected
for the operating system or hypervisor. Aggregation is done to account for the modifications that
can be made to a scenario, such as adding, removing, or moving workloads, changing the actual
profile data, or changing the resource allocations within the modeled hardware. Due to the
malleability of a scenario, it is possible that a scenario profile of a node could differ from profile
viewed from the Visualization tab in the Matrix Operating Environment for the real node.
This is particularly true of physical nodes that contain virtual nodes, such as a VM host. Additionally,
for ESX VM hosts, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Hyper-V hosts, data for non-guest workloads is not
collected for use in Capacity Advisor. Therefore, profile views accessed from the scenario editor
do not account for utilization by workloads that are not VM guests.
IMPORTANT: For specific descriptions of each field or summary table on the user interface
screens, click the help topic link on the software screen for the task.
The following sections describe how to access a profile viewer from various locations within Systems
Insight Manager.
46 Procedures