Chapter 2 Features

Table of Contents

Capacity Advisor lets you test configuration changes before actually making them in your data center, and helps you to manage existing resources to improve their utilization. For example, Capacity Advisor assists you in answering questions such as the following:

Is there room on this system to support additional work?
Will this workload fit on this system?
Can these servers be consolidated as virtual machines on a single server?
What might my resource demand be in six months or a year?
What are the estimated power costs for cooling a real or simulated system configuration?
What does a comparison of several what-if scenarios reveal about the analyzed alternatives?
What is the historic behavior of a system or workload?

Capacity Advisor obtains data for analysis from the following data collectors:

HP Utilization WBEM Provider
HP OpenView Performance Agent (OVPA)
Performance Management Pack (PMP)
an agentless solution on Microsoft Windows systems.

Capacity Advisor can display data about the following system resources:

CPU cores (number) and speed
Memory
Network I/O bandwidth
Disk I/O bandwidth
Power usage

Capacity Advisor enables you to collect resource data and create visualization graphs with the following views:

Historical utilization and trends
Data peaks
Peak durations
Forecasts

with the following utilization limits:

amount of acceptable resource usage
sustained time
percentage of time

Capacity Advisor enables you to create scenarios for what-if planning and forecasting, performing tasks such as the following:

For systems in scenarios:
- Create systems
- Remove systems
- Edit system attributes
- Move virtual machines
For workloads in scenarios:
- Create workloads
- Collect utilization data for workloads
- Import existing workload profiles
- Edit workload demands
- Move workloads between systems
- Park workloads
- Delete workloads
For scenarios themselves:
- View and undo/redo scenario changes
- Use the HP Smart Solver technology to perform:
  Automated server consolidation to virtual machines
  Automated load balancing of existing VM hosts or existing servers
  Automated workload stacking (consolidation)
- Create scenario comparison reports

For additional information about Capacity Advisor and how it fits into the Virtual Server Environment, refer to The HP Virtual Server Environment, Dan Herington and Bryan Jacquot, Hewlett-Packard Development Co., 2006.

Chapter 2 Features

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