Reserving capacity for upcoming services
A well-balanced resource management system is critical for any IT organization to support business in a cost-effective manner. It is very important to be able to estimate whether your existing infrastructure is able to accommodate additional projects to support an ever-changing business model. Reservation-aware capacity management in BMC Helix Capacity Optimization provides detailed future saturation information with respect to capacity management based on commitments made for future projects.
A Reservation is an event in the future that represents a request to allocate a given resource OR set of resources (based on Service or System templates) for use by a specific owner (for instance, a Project, User, Department, Tenant, and so on) for a specific time period. The reservation is in the realized state from the date when it becomes effective.
Reservations-aware capacity management enables you to configure the default behavior of reservations when you book capacity on a given Reservation Target type. You can manage resource reservation and increase the future capacity by onboarding, which enables you to automatically evaluate and predict the spare capacity.
You need a capacity pool for adding a reservation. Capacity Pools are a logical aggregation of Reservation Targets. The Reservations page has a set of tabs in the left pane. Complete the following steps to add a reservation:
Select a capacity pool: Use the Capacity Pools tab on the Reservations page.
Assign or unassign a capacity pool that was created in the Workspace to be used for Reservations. Capacity Pools are a logical aggregation of Reservation Targets based on business rules. Capacity Pool should never be selected by available capacity, and should be driven by the business purpose of the reservation. For example, you can group Reservation Targets into Capacity Pools based on the location.
- Add a reservation: Use the Reservations tab on the page.
- Place a reservation on the reservation target: Use the Placement option on a reservation page.
The following tabs on the Reservations page enable you to configure various parameters to manage reservation-aware capacity.
Tab | Capability provided... |
|---|---|
An Onboarding event is an event in the future that represents a known allocation of resources to the infrastructure. For example, additional memory needs to be allocated to a data center in New York. You can add an additional host to a cluster or add a cluster to the Capacity Pool. This incremental change in capacity is taken into consideration for estimating the available resources for future reservation events. | |
A Reservation Target is a system that contains resources such as CPU, Memory, and Storage. They can also contain reservation items such as Virtual Machines in a VMware vSphere cluster. You can evaluate the status of Reservation Targets (and its resources), and subsequently plan Onboarding events to allocate additional resources as required. | |
Add and manage system and service templates available for Reservations and Onboardings. You can select templates from the workspace tree and make them available for reservation items and onboarding events. | |
Create and manage Placement Rules that enforce user-defined criteria based on tags during placement of Reservation items into the Reservation Target. For example, a template with tag "FastStorage" should be placed on a Reservation Target with tag "Gold". | |
Configure default behavior of the Reservation system. For example, you can update the default resource comparison method. |