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  • 1.  VM Capacity Planning without collection of Host Data

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jul 07, 2015 12:24 AM

    Hi All,

     

    Currently customer has CA Capacity Management complete suite inclusive of CA Virtual Placement Manager, and is integrated with CA UIM ( Nimsoft) to collect the performance data from various systems ( Physical and Virtual Machines). The requirement from the customer is to do capacity planning for the Virtual Machines for which the data is getting collected via CA UIM Adapter.

     

    Below are some queries or concerns

     

    1. Can this be be done, as the virtualization platform is not VMware or Hyper-V ?

    2. Can we use the Server Configuration.xls file which consist of 2 Models mentioned as Generic Server / Generic WorkStation Models mentioned ?

    3. How can we add new Server Models ( as per the VMs Configuration) in Server Configuration.xls ?

     

    Is there any other way of doing VM Capacity Planning

     

    regards

    Sachin Sawant



  • 2.  Re: VM Capacity Planning without collection of Host Data

    Posted Jul 07, 2015 02:35 AM

    Hey,

    The UIM to CapMan integration is via the capman_da probe and support is probe specific.

    The current support probes are:

     

    ·        CDM

     

    ·        Clariion

     

    ·        IBMVM

     

    ·        VMware

     

    ·        VMAX

    I have a few questions:

     

    Did you mean the virtualization solution is hyper-v? If so there is not support for that via UIM as of this time, but it is thru the SCOM data adapter.

    If the VM’s are being monitored by a non-virtual aware source, like CDM, they will appear to Capacity Management as a physical server. There is not away to configure them as a VM in the spreadsheet, but you can use the ‘Ideal’ server configuration instead of ‘generic’ b/c generic has a limit of 4 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM. But be aware that the VM’s report relative capacity is not related to the actual underlying host.

     

    >KIP

     

    Kip Lamb

    Sr Principal Consultant, Presales

     

    CA Technologies | 13810 South East Eastgate Way Suite 500 | Bellevue, WA 98005

    Office: +1 512 776 0235 | Mobile: +1 425 591 4358 | Kip.Lamb@ca.com

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  • 3.  Re: VM Capacity Planning without collection of Host Data

    Posted Jul 07, 2015 04:29 AM

    Hi Sachin

     

    Following on from Kip's reply, Data Manager (and CCC / VPM) expects to be able to differentiate between Physical servers and Virtual hosts and VMs according to the configuration information presented by the target datasource.  In most circumstances, this has worked well historically but in today's cloud world, there are cases where continuing to mandate this distinction can cause challenges.  However, I have assisted customers with a similar use case - please see if anything below is of help to you.

     

    There are two teams responsible for Capacity Planning:

    • The Infrastructure team - responsible for delivering their internal private cloud platform (the hardware and virtualization solution itself)
    • The Business team - responsible for the VMs and 'logical' resources they require hosted on that platform, plus any legacy standalone servers too.

     

    The first team uses our OOTB VMware integration and CCR / VPM reports to deliver the infrastructure capacity planning.

     

    The second team, where they do not know (and are not responsible for) the underlying hardware, have got a second Data Manager instance where all 'OS instances' (VMs or standalone physical machines) are treated as 'logical' servers.  This is the same as the data provided by the CDM probe - ie. the incoming data is hardware agnostic and is relative to the allocated resources, whether they are vCPUs for a VM or physical cores for a standalone machine - there is no information on the underlying hardware itself.  All vCPUs and physical cores are treated equally - as 'logical' resources...

     

    We created one additional entry in the CML for 'Generic_Logical_Server' with large maximum values (64 CPUs, 512 GB RAM) and a 'resource score' of 1 TPP.  Everything in Server_Configuration.xlsx for the 'logical' DM instance is then set to Generic_Logical_Server.  (I can share the code to do this if required).  Note that in this case, all vCPUs are treated equally, with equal processing power, regardless of underlying hardware - this could be extended if needed, but was not necessary for this customer.

    .

    This setup supports capacity planning for the 'logical' resources only as required by the Business team, and works very well for their use case.

     

    • 'The requirement from the customer is to do capacity planning for the Virtual Machines for which the data is getting collected via CA UIM Adapter.'

     

    If that is your customer's only use case, you can set up capman_da probe to pull only CDM data, and it should work very well for them too.  The only consideration is that it is currently a challenge to support a mix of OOTB 'physical/virtual' configuration information with a 'logical-only' perspective in the same DM instance.

     

    Please let me know if this makes sense for you, and if you have further questions.

     

    Regards,

     

    Adrian