HP Matrix Operating Environment Software - Manual (Page 23)

3 Key Capacity Advisor concepts
Capacity planning goals
Capacity planners are driven by multiple, sometimes conflicting, goals:
• Avoiding surprises
• Planning for the future
• Maintaining quality of service (see “Quality of service ” (page 23) )
• Optimizing resource utilization
• Meeting internal and external security requirements
• Reducing costs
HP Insight Capacity Advisor software can help lessen the conflicts among goals by buttressing
decisions with better information and more robust models. Effective use of Capacity Advisor
can help you to double resource utilization in many situations.
The most important step in accomplishing capacity planning goals is to clearly understand the
goals and the relationship among them. For example, optimizing response time may preclude
trying to achieve the most efficient resource utilization, while optimizing resource utilization
can compromise certain types of security. It is critical to understand the requirements as well as
their priorities to provide best overall quality of service.
Quality of service
Typical aspects of quality of service include (but are not limited to):
• Availability
• Accessibility
• Integrity
• Performance
• Reliability
• Regulatory requirements
• Security
Quality of service is frequently defined in service level agreements between organizations.
Utilization monitor, calculator, and simulator
At a fundamental level, HP Insight Capacity Advisor software collects data from utilization
monitoring daemons on systems and workloads. Using this data, Capacity Advisor can report
on utilization of memory, core processing units, I/O bandwidth, and power. It can calculate what
resource utilization would look like if the load were increased or decreased. Further, it can
simulate what resource utilization might look like if loads are combined. This goes beyond simple
addition of maximum loads to provide a dynamic addition of components based on the time
sequence of utilization measurements taken from the actual loads running on real systems (see
“Peaks and sums” (page 25) ).
Data handling for virtual machines
Data collected by Capacity Advisor for use in a profile viewer and historical utilization reports
can vary from data reported by tools that run inside a virtual machine. These tools include HP-UX
and Linux commands such as top, ps, and sar, and on Microsoft Windows, the task manager
or perfmon.
This data can vary in a couple of ways. For example:
• Capacity Advisor usually reports CPU utilization that is greater than what is reported by
the VM guest. The operating system inside a virtual machine only knows about the CPU
Capacity planning goals 23