HP Capacity Advisor 6.2 Users Guide

Task: Plan server consolidation
This section starts with a general procedure for consolidating servers (“Understanding the
consolidation task” (page 36)), followed by an example of manual server consolidation (“Example
consolidation: Stacking applications on an existing server” (page 36)). The second half of this
section shows how to automate server consolidation using the HP Smart Solver (“Automating
the consolidation task” (page 46)); also followed by an example (“Example consolidation:
Automating stacking on a “what-if” server” (page 47)).
Understanding the consolidation task
There are three fundamental approaches to consolidating servers:
• Stacking workloads (representing applications) into standalone servers or nPartitions.
• Stacking virtual machines onto a single physical system or nPartitions.
• Stacking nPartitions and virtual partitions into complexes.
The task description below is based on stacking server workloads onto one virtual machine and
VM host. For other consolidations, the changes made when editing the scenario would differ.
Prerequisites
• You must have already collected data on the systems of interest (see “Gathering data for
Capacity Advisor” (page 55)).
• You should be familiar with Capacity Advisor operations (see “Procedures” (page 55)).
• You must be logged in to Insight Dynamics (see “Accessing Capacity Advisor” (page 55)).
For specific descriptions of each field shown on the user interface screens, click the on the
software screen.
Table 4-2 Checklist — Consolidating server loads onto a virtual machine manually
Related Procedure(s)Task
• “Creating a consolidation candidates report” (page 76)Determine which systems to consolidate (both to
and from).
• “Creating a planning scenario” (page 86)Create a planning scenario.
• “Creating an historic utilization report” (page 72)
• “Creating a cost allocation report” (page 76)
Run reports on the scenario systems.
(Include this step if you want to obtain a baseline
set of reports to compare your scenario changes
against.) See also “Task: Understand current
resource usage” (page 35).
• “Creating a system” (page 93) or “Adding an existing
system” (page 94)
• “Editing a system” (page 94)
• “Changing servers to be VMs (manually)” (page 95)
• “Setting global utilization limits” (page 79)
Edit the scenario copy:
• Set up the new VM host system.
• Modify resources on systems as needed.
• Make each system to be consolidated become
a VM.
• Modify utilization limits, if desired.
• “Creating a scenario utilization report” (page 73)Evaluate new quality of service
• “Creating a cost allocation report” (page 76)Estimate new cost allocation on the VM host
Example consolidation: Stacking applications on an existing server
This example demonstrates how Capacity Advisor can be used to simulate converting physical
servers to virtual machines, and to then stack those VMs onto one VM host.
Assume that you have a set of legacy servers that currently support one application each. There
is good data on resource utilization for each of these servers, and it is time to see if converting
these application servers into VMs and then consolidating the VMs onto fewer VM hosts can
36 Planning with Capacity Advisor