Capacity Planning with Capacity Advisor

Another place where the flexibility of the VSE can introduce new challenges is capacity planning. Most capacity-planning tools are designed to assess resource consumption trends, determine when additional resources will be needed, and determine what size a new system will need to be to support a workload. Clearly, when the size of the system or the partition running the workload can vary based on the load on the application, it is no longer necessary to size a server or partition for the peak of the workload. More accurately, the size of the server becomes an aggregate size based on the set of applications that will be running there and when each of them peaks.

To address this, HP has introduced the Capacity Advisor product as part of the VSE management suite. This product is intended to address the same set of problems as traditional capacity-planning products but to do it with knowledge of the flexing characteristics of the underlying VSE technologies.

Key Benefits

The key benefits that you will see with Capacity Advisor include:

• in-depth knowledge of the flexing capabilities of each of the VSE technologies

• ability to take advantage of data collected by other tools

• ability to do what-if analyses based on potential reconfigurations of the VSE technologies you may be considering

• ability to provide guidance in how to best take advantage of VSE technologies

The most significant of these is the first one. There are many capacity-planning tools out there, but none of them have a detailed understanding of the impact the flexing characteristics of each of the partitioning or Utility Pricing technologies will have on the real capacity requirements of your workloads.

The fact that Capacity Advisor can input data from the OpenView Performance Agent and will be able to input data from other data sources in the future, means that you can reduce the amount of data you are collecting. Rather than collecting another set of data, Capacity Advisor can simply adapt the data from these other tools.

Each of the VSE technologies can be reconfigured based on the needs of the workloads running on a system. This can mean changing the size of a partition or even moving a workload from one system to another. Capacity Advisor makes it possible for you to simulate any of these changes to understand what the impact would be before you actually do it.

The last item in the list above alludes to the fact that you can use Capacity Advisor to simulate changes to the environment that allow you to optimize how resources are used. By taking advantage of flexing or moving workloads around to take better advantage of available resources, you may be able to reduce the need to purchase additional systems.

Key Tradeoffs

This is a new product. Therefore, the tradeoffs center on the fact that the first release will provide only the most compelling capacity-planning features for users of a VSE. The focus for this product is to provide basic capacity planning that will take the flexibility of the VSE into consideration in its simulation algorithms.

Sweet Spots

Some of the sweet spots for Capacity Advisor are really by association with the other VSE Products. For example, the fact that partitions can flex means that you can run a system at higher utilization and still be sure you have enough resources to handle any expected or unexpected spikes in demand. The sweet spots for this product include:

• increasing the comfort level of customers regarding high utilization

• moving an app onto a VSE system

• moving an app between systems in a VSE

The level of flexibility that is available in the VSE has been around for a few years, but it is still new to many customers. The idea of using this capability to drive up utilization introduces the risk that multiple applications will peak at the same time and there will not be enough resources for all of them. This makes some customers uncomfortable. Capacity Advisor can help with this by giving the customer the ability to assess the resource consumption patterns of various combinations of applications to help find the right balance between increasing utilization and risking performance problems due to multiple applications peaking at the same time.

Sweet Spot #1: Capacity Advisor Increases Utilization Comfortably

Capacity Advisor simulations can increase your comfort level that your systems will not run out of resources, even if multiple applications peak at the same time.

Another sweet spot for Capacity Advisor is when you are considering moving an application off an existing platform onto a server that is using VSE technologies. Capacity Advisor can help you determine what VSE system to put the new application on and help you understand how to configure the resource minimums and maximums and even the gWLM policies for the workload on the new system.

Sweet Spot #2: Capacity Advisor Simulates Moving an Application into the VSE

At some point you will need to move applications from static systems or partitions into a flexible VSE environment. Capacity Advisor will help you understand where to put the application and how to configure the VSE to handle it.

The third item is a variation on the secondCapacity Advisor can be used to simulate the movement of a workload between systems on a VSE. The benefits are similar, but this feature also helps you see what level of resources will be freed up on the original platform to see if there is room for some other application to be placed there.

Sweet Spot #4: Capacity Advisor Can Rebalance Your VSE

It is possible that you will deploy a number of workloads within a set of VSE systems and the result will be an uneven load. Capacity Advisor can help you determine how to rebalance the workloads to better load the various systems in the environment.