HP Capacity Advisor 7.2 User Guide

1 Introduction
This document describes how to use HP Capacity Advisor to plan for resource usage changes in
a virtualized server environment, and analyze system data to flag any potential problems. Examples
help you with common planning and analysis tasks. This document is for technical professionals
working in data center operations, administration, and planning. Some understanding of system
administration is assumed.
Capacity Advisor is a program that allows you to monitor and evaluate system and workload
utilization of CPU cores, memory, network and disk I/O, and power. With this information, you
can load your systems to make best use of the available resources.
You can monitor and evaluate one or more systems that are connected in a cluster configuration
or to a network. A single system can include multi-core or hyper-threaded processors.
Capacity Advisor helps you evaluate system consolidations, load balancing, changing system
attributes, and varying workloads to decide how to move workloads to improve utilization. The
quantitative results from Capacity Advisor can aid the planner in estimating future system workloads
and in planning for changes to system configurations. With Capacity Advisor, you can perform
the following tasks within an easy-to-navigate, clearly notated graphical user interface:
• View historical resource utilization for whole-OS and monitored workloads on HP-UX and
OpenVMS systems and whole-OS workload resource utilization on Microsoft Windows and
Linux systems.
• View historical workload resource utilization and aggregate utilization across the partitioning
continuum (see the HP Insight Management Support Matrix for a complete list of supported
platforms).
• Generate reports on computing resource utilization, consolidation candidates, cost allocation,
peak usage and server populations.
• Plan workload or system changes, and assess impact on resource utilization.
• Assess resource utilization impact for proposed changes in workload location or size.
• Evaluate trends for forecasting resource needs.
Capacity Advisor can be used to simulate changes in system configuration, such as the following:
• Consolidating several systems into one system
• Re-sizing a system for an upgrade
• Re-sizing the demands on a system to reflect a forecast
• Replacing older, small to mid-sized systems with virtual machines
Capacity Advisor can use data collected over time to show the results of these configuration changes
in many ways. Graphical views are available so you can see what the effects of the changes are
over time. Tables are available that give the percentage of time and the degree to which the system
is busy; this information is valuable in comparing resource utilization and quality of service before
and after a change. Other tables show how many minutes per month the system is unacceptably
busy—a measure valuable for both quality of service and for estimating TiCAP bills. Because
Capacity Advisor works from data traces collected over time, it is much more accurate than using
only peak data or average data in understanding your systems and the workloads they support.
The significant advantage in using Capacity Advisor, rather than ad hoc processes or guesswork,
is that it provides a quantitative basis for examining the usage of current resources. Additionally,
it provides the capability to try simulations (what-if scenarios) for moving workloads or other
resources before you actually implement a move.
Capacity Advisor incorporates numerical values of several components in its analysis and modeling,
including:
11