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Selecting consolidation candidates and reviewing exceptions

Select Consolidate to Virtual  after selecting data for your virtualization study to display the Consolidate to Virtual - Select Candidates page.

To select candidates for the study

Follow the steps given below to select candidates for a new study:

  1. Select a Study Profile from the Study Profile drop-down list.
  2. Use any of the predefined filters from the Candidate Filter drop down list or create your own filters to dynamically narrow down and select consolidation candidates. To create a custom filter, select Create your own filter. For more information, see Creating-computer-filters-for-a-virtualization-study.

  3. The servers listed in the Filtered Candidates table are those included in the domain and entity filter selected that are compatible with the Study Profile.
    Select the candidates for the study from the table. For more details, see Viewing the filtered candidates list. The candidates you select will appear in the Consolidation Candidates list shown below the table.

    Success

    Tips

    • Click on any of the columns in the Filtered Candidates table to sort the list of candidates by the value in that column. Click the column header again to reverse the sort order.
    • You can use multiple filters to display other computers that can be added to the list of consolidation candidates. For example, if you want to consolidate all the Windows XP and Windows 2003 computers, select Computers running Windows XP from the Candidate Filter list, and click the heading checkbox to select all the displayed computers. Repeat this process using the Computers running Windows 2003 filter to append computers to the existing Consolidation Candidates list.
  4. Computers with issues are listed in the Exceptions pane. Review the reported exceptions to verify that no important systems have been excluded due to data issues.

  5. The Consolidation Candidates pane lists the candidates selected for the study from the Filtered Candidates table. Click the magnifying glass icon to view a table, and performance charts for the list of candidates in the study. The graphs at the bottom of the page provide a snapshot of the resource utilization, by interval, for the time period selected for the study. The legend to the right of the graph provides a color-coded list of each candidate.

    Information
    Additional information

    Contact your administrator if you notice system data missing on the graphs for one or more of the intervals in the selected time period.

Warning

Note

 Use the calendar icon to modify the Time Period for your study only if necessary. All the information displayed on the page will be refreshed, and existing selections will be discarded.

Click Next to display the Consolidate to Virtual - Select Targets page. For information about selecting targets for the consolidation study, see Specifying-study-parameters-and-selecting-virtual-targets.

Viewing the filtered candidates list

The following table describes the columns in the Filtered Candidates list.

Consolidate to Virtual - Select Candidates page
Consolidate-Candidate.png


Understanding Virtualization Ready Index (VRI)

The Virtualization Ready Index is calculated using the following formula: 

 

VRI = (1 - min(1,AVG(CPU_UTILMHZ)/REF_MAX_CPU_GHZ))

    * (1 - min(1,AVG(MEM_CONSUMED)/REF_MAX_MEM_AVAILABLE))

    * (1 - min(1,AVG(DISK_IO_RATE)/REF_MAX_DISK_IOPS))

    * (1 - min(1,AVG(NET_BIT_RATE)/REF_MAX_NET_BANDWIDTH))

This formula calculates the average resource utilization for the candidate server, and compares it with a set of configurable reference values. By default, the following values are set for these reference values:

 

Reference value

Default value

REF_MAX_CPU_GHZ

5 GHz

REF_MAX_MEM_AVAILABLE

8 GB

REF_MAX_DISK_IOPS

75K I/O operations per second (IOPS)

REF_MAX_NET_BANDWIDTH

1 Gigabit per second

According to the formula used to calculate the VRI and the default reference values in the preceding table, the VRI is a value between 0 and 1.

For candidates servers with VRI values, the VRI provides a sortable index to compare different computers.

Information
Info
  • A VRI closer to 1 (one) signifies that the server is a good candidate for virtualization, due to low resource utilization.
  • A VRI of 0 (zero) does not necessarily mean that the server cannot be virtualized, but that its virtualization should be considered carefully.

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*

BMC Helix Capacity Optimization 20.02