Configuring HP SIM for Optimal Performance in Large Environments

ManualsBrandsHP ManualsSoftwareHP Systems Insight Manager 6.x Windows Software

Table of contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3

HP Systems Insight Manager ............................................................................................................. 3

Customizing Systems Insight Manager .................................................................................................... 3

Microsoft SQL Server ........................................................................................................................ 3

System

resources

.............................................................................................................................. 3

Job cleanup for a large number of managed systems ........................................................................... 4

Remote

Microsoft

SQL

Server

(recommended)

....................................................................................... 5

Systems Insight Manager

Sizer

tool

.................................................................................................... 5

Customizing

Systems Insight Manager

your

environment

........................................................................ 6

Creating

hierarchy:

One

master

CMS

with

several

regions

................................................................. 6

Master

CMS:

............................................................................................................................... 6

Regionalize

CMS

for:

.................................................................................................................... 6

Discovery

............................................................................................................................. 6

range

...................................................................................................................................... 6

Changing

Timeouts

and

Retries

.......................................................................................................... 8

System

and

event

management

.......................................................................................................... 8

Customizing

the

query

system

......................................................................................................... 8

Customizing the task system ......................................................................................................... 11

Tuning Microsoft Windows Server 2008 .............................................................................................. 12

Using Performance Monitor to optimize Microsoft Windows 2008....................................................... 12

Configuring the logging feature ................................................................................................... 13

Examining the log data ............................................................................................................... 13

Performance

Analysis

Logs

(PAL)

tool

............................................................................................. 13

Virtual memory paging ................................................................................................................... 14

Tuning disk input and output ............................................................................................................ 15

Disk tuning – RAID 5 performance ................................................................................................ 15

Tuning

single

disk

.................................................................................................................... 15

Additional tips: .......................................................................................................................... 15

Configuring the network.................................................................................................................. 15

Microsoft

Windows

Server

2008

performance

tuning

......................................................................... 16

CPU

configuration

....................................................................................................................... 16

Systems Insight Manager

memory

requirements

............................................................................. 16

System

Page

file

......................................................................................................................... 17

Disk

subsystem

........................................................................................................................... 17

Network

subsystem

..................................................................................................................... 17

TcpTimedWaitDelay

.................................................................................................................... 17

Tuning

Microsoft

SQL

Server

............................................................................................................ 17

Optimizing Microsoft SQL Server performance with Microsoft SQL Server components ........................... 18

Worker threads .......................................................................................................................... 18

Configuring HP SIM for optimal performance

in large environments

Summary of content (25 pages)

PAGE 1
Configuring HP SIM for optimal performance in large environments Table of contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3 HP Systems Insight Manager ............................................................................................................. 3 Customizing Systems Insight Manager ....................................................................................................
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Lazy Writer ................................................................................................................................ 19 Log manager .............................................................................................................................. 19 Moving tempdb location ................................................................................................................. 20 SQL Server minimum and maximum memory ................................................
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Introduction HP Systems Insight Manager HP Systems Insight Manager is a web-based management application that integrates existing management technologies with the latest advances in Internet technology. It provides a proactive, easy-to-use, automated, costeffective solution for managing distributed systems. Systems Insight Manager enables management of standards-based, distributed computing environments.
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 Disks—The number of drives needed to support the input/output requirements or the amount of storage space (in MB) required to hold the data  Memory—The amount of memory needed to support a given workload  Network—The number and type of network interface cards (NICs) needed to support workload demands Ideally, you set the CPU as the limiting resource because processing power provides the most scalable solution.
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Figure 1: Task Results Page When you need to manage up to 5,000 systems, HP recommends the following default settings. These settings might not be ideal for every situation, but they serve as a starting point from which further adjustment might be necessary depending on performance needs.
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existing Systems Insight Manager deployments. HP recommends that you consult the Sizer tool when considering CMS hardware and database configurations. The Systems Insight Manager Sizing Tool is located at http://www.hp.com/go/insight/sizer. Customizing Systems Insight Manager to your environment Creating a hierarchy: One master CMS with several regions When creating a hierarchy in an environment where systems can be broken down into region consider creating one master CMS and several regional CMS.
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are discovered. Polling and data collection, like discovery, have retries and timeouts associated with them after they are invoked. HP recommends that you customize the default tasks in HP SIM to represent the network of systems being managed. For servers that require constant vigilance (like Microsoft ® Exchange® servers), create a Hardware Status Polling task (based on a collection containing the Microsoft Exchange server systems) to run every 5 minutes.
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Note: Do not let status polling tasks overlap. Time the Server Polling taskcompletion time by making sure the interval is longer than the completion time. Changing Timeouts and Retries HP SIM uses Ping, TCP, and HTTP, WBEM, and SSH protocols to determine if a system is on the network. During the communication phase of discovery, you can customize several items to conform to your network environment including Ping, SNMP Retries, and Timeouts. HP SIM is tailored, out-of-the-box, for a LAN configuration.
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Two default queries, All Systems and All Events, produce a listing of all systems that have been discovered by Systems Insight Manager, and a list of all events that have been received. Separating events by what is important to your business needs is essential to maintain the performance of Systems Insight Manager. When managing a large number of systems (greater than 1,000), you can segment the systems according to importance, location, type, operating system, and more.
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You can clear events so that undesired items can be easily filtered out. This filtering can be performed automatically by creating a collection to filter all events older than 14 days, then creating a task to delete events from that collection in a week. The following example filters all Informational Events older than 14 days. Figure 5: A collection to filter all informational events greater than 14 days old 2.
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Figure 7: Select Schedule 4. In the Task name field, name the task. For instance, the following task is named Delete Informational Events Older than 14 days. You scheduled the task to run periodically and refined the schedule to run every 14 days at 6:00 a.m. All these options are configurable to your business needs.
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arrangement might not be practical, nor would it be likely that you would want to poll all of your desktops or all your servers on the same schedule. By segmenting the collections by areas of responsibility or specific functions of systems (Exchange servers, clusters, and so on), you can configure Systems Insight Manager to poll these systems appropriately. For example, you can poll your most important Exchange or SQL servers once per minute, and all other servers in your environment, once every 30 minutes.
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 Network Interface Object o Output Queue Length o Bytes Total per second  Processor Object (for CPU monitoring) o Percent Total Processor Time o Queue Length In general, if an application is running at over 70% CPU utilization and a queue is forming, dig deeper to determine which system resource is holding back the performance of your Microsoft Windows 2008 system.
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optimization. You can find the tool at http://www.codeplex.com/PAL . It is open source and is released under the Microsoft® Public License (MS-PL). Virtual memory paging The working set of a process is where its current code and data are physically located in RAM.
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Tuning disk input and output Disk tuning – RAID 5 performance Ensure that there are no other bottlenecks (CPU, NIC, or memory) before adding more disks. Typically, the SCSI or Fibre Channel is not saturated, but rather there are not enough disks configured. Ensure that you place the log files, indexes, and database files on different array sets. The RAID stripe size is written to each system in the array or to the group of systems in the RAID set.
PAGE 16
 Ensure that nothing else is a bottleneck on the management server, client, or network. If your network is not the limiting factor in your setup, then a fast NIC will probably not help. Ensure that the application, CPUs, memory, and disks are not limiting your network performance.  Try a test case of your management server and clients on their own isolated LAN to see what kind of throughput can be achieved.
PAGE 17
msdtfis launched by the service. The main purpose of this process is to handle the audit logging and SSH command line execution for MSA, SSA, and command launch tools. Memory for this process is not nearly as high, usually less than 100 MB. mxinventory mxinventory is started as needed for WBEM and DMI data collection. When idle for longer periods it shuts itself down for a short time. Note that for there might be two instances of this process started, one for WBEM the other for DMI.
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principles in mind when you are tuning Microsoft SQL Server:  Plan for disk input/output subsystem performance. The placement of the paging file, transaction logs, and system databases can have a big impact on system performance and recoverability. Place log files and database files on different physical drives. Microsoft SQL Server performance can be enhanced by locating log files and database files on separate physical drives.
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Worker threads write out most of the dirty 8-KB pages from the Microsoft SQL Server buffer cache. Input/output operations are scheduled by worker threads asynchronously for maximum performance. Lazy Writer Microsoft SQL Server Lazy Writer helps produce free buffers, which are 8-KB data cache pages that contain no data. As Lazy Writer flushes each 8-KB cache buffer out to disk, it initializes the cache page identity so that other data can be written into the free buffer.
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For highest performance, you can use a caching controller for Microsoft SQL Server log files if the controller guarantees that data entrusted to it is written to disk ev entually, even if the power fails. Moving tempdb location If you can add more physical drives to the system, HP recommends that you move tempdb locations to different physical drives to avoid read or write delays associated with operating system and SQL Server background activity.
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Advanced Windowing Extensions (AWE) is a method that the Windows operating system can make more than 4 GB available to applications through system calls. To take advantage of AWE memory, you must configure both Microsoft Windows 2008 x32 and Microsoft SQL Server. PAE PAE is the added ability of the IA32 processor to address more than 4 GB of physical memory. Note that this section does not apply to 64-bit versions of Windows. Note: This applies specifically to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.
PAGE 22
Previously with Windows Server 2003 x32, system memory was divided; 2GB was allocated to usermode processes and 2GB to kernel-mode process address space. If allocating more memory to usermode space was desired, the /3gb switch could be placed in the boot.ini file. With Server 2008, the IncreaseUserVA boot option can be used to increase user-mode address space, thus making more memory available to user processes.
PAGE 23
Microsoft Windows 2008 x32 is a 32-bit operating system. By default, it can support only up to 4 GB of memory (2 GB for the operating system and 2 GB for user applications). In a practical sense, this generally means that Microsoft SQL Server is limited to 2 GB of RAM. In many cases, this is more than enough RAM for Microsoft SQL Server. See Configuring Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to use PAE. Microsoft SQL Server Express When installing HP SIM, you can install and use Microsoft SQL Server Express.
PAGE 24
Using AWE memory After both Microsoft Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 are properly configured, you can take advantage of the benefits of your added RAM. If you have just added RAM to a new Microsoft SQL Server, you must watch the buffer cache hit ratio to see the effect of the addition of more RAM. If you still do not get a 90% or more buffer cache hit ratio after adding the extra RAM, you might need to consider adding even more RAM, or redesigning your database so that it is more efficient.
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For more information www.hp.com/go/somewhere HP Partitioning Continuum, HP, 2008 HP ENSAextended technical overview, HP, 2008 HP Utility Data Center Overview, HP, 2008 Call to action www.hp.com/go/somewhere HP Partitioning Continuum, HP, 2008 HP ENSAextended technical overview, HP, 2008 HP Utility Data Center Overview, HP, 2008 Technology for better business outcomes © Copyright 2010, 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.