System Sizing Guidelines for Integrity Virtual Machines Deployment -- Hardware Consolidation with Integrity Virtual Machines

ManualsBrandsHP ManualsSoftwareHP Matrix Operating Environment w/Insight Control 24x7 Supp Flexible Lic

System Sizing Guidelines

for Integrity Virtual Machines Deployment

Hardware Consolidation with Integrity Virtual Machines

Isom Crawford, HP BCS

A Technical White Paper from HP

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3

Using Integrity Virtual Machines for Hardware Consolidation .................................................................... 3

Identifying Workloads Suitable for Hardware Consolidation ................................................................. 4

Preparing for Consolidation - Utilization Reconnaissance .......................................................................... 5

Peaks and Averages ......................................................................................................................... 5

Data Collection Tools........................................................................................................................ 6

HP Operations Center‟s Performance Agent and GlancePlus ............................................................. 6

HP Capacity Advisor .................................................................................................................... 6

Calculating Platform Utilization .............................................................................................................. 7

Expected Platform Utilization ............................................................................................................. 7

Expected Utilization Example ............................................................................................................ 8

Expected CPU Utilization ............................................................................................................... 8

Expected I/O Utilization ............................................................................................................... 8

Extending the Utilization Calculations ................................................................................................. 8

Consolidation Considerations and Utilization Goals ................................................................................ 9

Utilization Thresholds ........................................................................................................................ 9

Aggressively Increasing Hardware Utilization .................................................................................... 10

Analyzing the Capacity of the Target System ........................................................................................ 11

Mass Storage Requirements for Integrity VM...................................................................................... 11

VM Host System Configuration for Optimal Memory Utilization ........................................................... 11

Virtual Memory Base Page Size ................................................................................................... 11

File Cache Size .......................................................................................................................... 12

Inode Caches ............................................................................................................................. 12

Memory Requirements for the VM Host ............................................................................................. 12

Additional Memory Requirement for I/O Adapters on Integrity i2 Servers ......................................... 12

Storage Requirements for each Virtual Machine ............................................................................. 13

Calculating the Virtual Machine Capacity of an Existing Server ........................................................... 13

VM Host Memory and Storage Sizing Example .............................................................................. 13

Summary of content (21 pages)

PAGE 1
System Sizing Guidelines for Integrity Virtual Machines Deployment Hardware Consolidation with Integrity Virtual Machines Isom Crawford, HP BCS A Technical White Paper from HP Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Using Integrity Virtual Machines for Hardware Consolidation ....................................................................
PAGE 2
Identifying Memory Available for Use by Virtual Machines .............................................................. 14 Identifying the Capacity Requirements for a New VM Host ................................................................. 14 Computing the Memory Capacity for the VM Deployment ............................................................... 14 Computing the Storage Capacity for the VM Deployment ................................................................
PAGE 3
Introduction Integrity servers help to meet your business needs by allowing you to consolidate multiple applications onto a single server using a combination of HP-UX 11i Partitioning Continuum and Virtual Server Environment (VSE) technologies. The partitioning techniques, which you can use alone or in combination, include hard partitions, virtual partitions, virtual machines, and resource partitions.
PAGE 4
Virtualization makes it easier to share hardware because one Integrity Server can host multiple instances of an operating system. However, combining multiple OS instances on a single physical machine requires planning. The steps to consolidating workloads with Integrity VM are: 1. Identify hardware utilization characteristics of workloads that are candidates for consolidation. 2.
PAGE 5
Preparing for Consolidation - Utilization Reconnaissance When considering a workload for hardware consolidation, collect the utilization data that is available, note its characteristics, and determine what information is important and what is not. If you are preparing to consolidate several workloads, collect the utilization information (both quantitative and qualitative) for every workload – not just for a few.
PAGE 6
Data Collection Tools Many system management products provide excellent utilization analysis tools. HP Operations Center products can help in identifying average utilization as well as time, duration, and extent of peak utilization (or „spikes‟). The Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor also features workload and hardware utilization tools as well as capabilities for analyzing workload aggregation on various server configuration scenarios.
PAGE 7
Calculating Platform Utilization In many cases, candidate workloads for consolidation will move from other, probably older, servers. This immediately creates a challenge in addressing how to accommodate the difference in hardware performance. The problem of comparing different hardware platforms for purposes of workload performance expectation is not new and certainly not unique to Integrity VM.
PAGE 8
Expected Utilization Example After you identify the multipliers, you can generate the utilization information in a very straightforward way. Consider a workload with the following utilization footprint: CPU – 15% Disk – 5% Network – 2% This workload currently resides on an HP 9000 Model A500 single-CPU server with one network interface card (NIC). The server used for consolidation is an Integrity rx4640 (1.5GHz CPU, 4MB cache Itanium 2 processor).
PAGE 9
Consolidation Considerations and Utilization Goals After you collect utilization information for all of the workloads, consider the capacity of the target physical server in the context of these workloads. Specifically, you need to identify the maximum aggregate hardware utilization level that is acceptable. This level ultimately determines how many workloads you should consolidate on the target server.
PAGE 10
Depending on the types of workloads and the Integrity server you are using for consolidation, you can set your target higher (or lower). Use the high end of your target utilization range for CPU consolidation and the low end for I/O (both network and mass storage) consolidation. Consider higher thresholds (beyond the upper range) for workloads that are computationally intensive and have very little interaction with the operating system or I/O systems.
PAGE 11
Analyzing the Capacity of the Target System After identifying the resources required for the workloads being consolidated, one is ready to begin calculating the capacity required by the Integrity VM Host system. To do so, the storage requirements for the Integrity VM product must also be accounted for.
PAGE 12
File and Buffer Cache Sizes By reducing the size of the file cache on the VM Host, the memory overhead of Integrity VM is reduced significantly, especially for systems with more than 32GB of physical memory.
PAGE 13
For most Integrity systems, the memory required for I/O adapters is negligible. One exception is the HP Integrity BL8x0c i2 Server Blade system – based on the Intel Itanium processor 9300 series. The 10GbE (10GigE) network ports on BL8x0c i2 server blades require an additional 500MB of memory per 10GbE network port when they are configured for Flex10 or jumbo frames. If these ports have both Flex10 and jumbo frames enabled, then the additional memory requirement is 1GB per 10GbE network port.
PAGE 14
Identifying Memory Available for Use by Virtual Machines An additional 8.3% of memory is required by Integrity VM for memory to be used by a VM. Therefore, if you define a VM to have 10 GB of memory, then Integrity VM requires 10.83 GB of memory to instantiate that VM. Similarly, a VM defined with 4GB of memory requires approximately 4.33 GB of memory to instantiate it.
PAGE 15
Computing the Storage Capacity for the VM Deployment Storage capacity for each VM has no appreciable overhead. Therefore the VM needs exactly the storage needed for the application stack (including the operating system) to be run on that VM. In this regard, storage sizing is identical to that of physical servers. As mentioned above, the VM Host requires a minimum of approximately 24GB of disk space.
PAGE 16
Stacking Workloads - Example 2 In this example, an Integrity Server hosts ten workloads, all with the expected utilizations as shown in Table 2. Table 2 – Average expected utilizations of workloads in Example 2.
PAGE 17
Stacking Workloads - Example 3 For an Integrity server to host ten similar workloads that all experience peak load during the months of September through October, the workloads have the expected utilization characteristics described in Table 3. Table 3 - Average expected utilizationa of workloads in Example 3.
PAGE 18
Deploying Consolidated Workloads Response times and bandwidth alone are not enough to represent native performance. Workloads executing on virtual machines share the same hardware. In order to understand the impact of workload consolidation, it is critical to understand the way that the applications use hardware resources.
PAGE 19
Configuring I/O Based on Resource Utilization Once the utilization calculations are complete, do not forget about them when configuring virtual I/O devices. For example, if you have sized the VM Host for two physical NICs to be shared by six VMs, do not be careless when assigning those virtual NICs to virtual switches. Doing so creates a performance bottleneck as in the example shown in Figure 2.
PAGE 20
Figure 3 – Careful assignment of virtual I/O devices is a critical step in server virtualization.
PAGE 21
The Benefits of Consolidating with Integrity VM Hardware consolidation with Integrity VM can achieve high levels of efficiency with little effort, as compared to consolidating workloads within a single OS instance or shared middleware. The most likely area where consolidation with Integrity VM may prove troublesome is in failure to consider all of the hardware requirements of the workloads: network, storage, memory, as well as CPU.