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

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. Subsequently, you are ready
to either
 Calculate the virtual machine capacity of an existing Integrity server, or
 Identify the capacity requirements for a new Integrity VM Host server
In this section, we discuss how to calculate the capacity required for both the Integrity VM system
along with the workloads to be deployed there.
Mass Storage Requirements for Integrity VM
Installation of Integrity VM on a physical Integrity server includes the Integrity VM software and the
HP-UX operating system. You must consider the mass storage and memory required for their
operation when you are determining the capacity of the physical server. The following summarizes
the capacity requirements for Integrity Servers running Integrity Virtual Machines version 4.0 and
later.
Mass storage required for the Integrity VM software installation (independent of the individual
virtual machines used by the workloads) includes disk space sufficient for the HP-UX OE installation
(minimally 20 GB) and disk space required for swap. No additional swap space is required for
virtual machines with Integrity VM version 4 and later. In general, refer to the “HP-UX 11i v3
Installation and Update Guide” and “HP-UX 11i v3 Read Before Installing or Updating”
documentation for swap space recommendations with HP-UX 11iv3. As a result, the storage
required on the Integrity VM Host system is:
VM Host disk space = (HP-UX OE installation) + (swap space)
Storage Requirements for each Virtual Machine
In addition to the above requirements for the VM Host, each virtual machine (VM) requires sufficient
disk space for the workload (OS and application). These disk requirements are the same as those
of the workload on a physical server.
VM Host System Configuration for Optimal Memory Utilization
The Integrity VM Host system is a dedicated, special purpose server. As a result, tuning the VM
Host system is required for optimal efficiency of VM operation. To do so, HP recommends the
following tunable settings for the VM Host system only. Configure and tune Individual VMs for the
workload they are executing using the tunable settings recommended by HP for Integrity servers.
Virtual Memory Base Page Size
Increasing the base_pagesize tunable to 64 will provide significant memory savings on the VM
Host system. Some software may be impacted and rendered inoperable by setting the
base_pagesize to anything other than the default value. For more information, consult the white
paper Tunable Base Page Size, available from HP‟s documentation website. To set the
base_pagesize tunable to the recommended value of 64K:
kctune base_pagesize=64
Note that changing this tunable does require a reboot of the system.