HP Insight Capacity Advisor 6.0 Software: User Guide

4 Planning with Capacity Advisor
Getting ready
In order to get maximum value from the Capacity Advisor tools, it is important to:
• Be familiar with the HP SIM framework
• Be familiar with the basic operation of Capacity Advisor
• Be familiar with Virtualization Manager
• Have a clear question you are trying to answer
• Have plenty of utilization data collected for Capacity Advisor
• Have appropriate access roles on the servers about which you are developing the plan
• Understand the equipment well enough to know what is physically possible (such as the
maximum number of CPU cores) and what is practical (such as when to use 1 GB DIMMs
with lots of slots versus when 4 GB DIMMs are more appropriate.) HP software can account
for various power saving associated with specific DIMM.
In addition, it can be very valuable to collect data on a test system to understand the real utilization
characteristics of the applications you are considering.
Task: Understand current resource usage
For specific descriptions of each field shown on the user interface screens, click the on the
software screen.
Table 4-1 Checklist — Obtaining reports on current resource usage
Related procedure(s)Task
• “First data collection (or the automated nightly collection)”
(page 56)
• “Modifying a collection schedule” (page 58)
• “Ascertaining the data collection availability for a set of
servers” (page 63)
Collect data for a period of time that fully reflects
your business cycle(s).
• “The report wizard” (page 69)
• “Creating an historic utilization report” (page 70)
Run utilization reports for selected resources of
interest.
• “Creating a cost allocation report” (page 73)Estimate current cost allocation for selected
resources.
Getting ready 35