Managing the capacity of your Hyper-V infrastructure

As illustrated in the flow diagram, the BMC Helix Capacity Optimization data source collects data from the Hyper-V resources. The collected data is transferred to the BMC Helix Capacity Optimization data warehouse where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. You can use the product functionalities to review, analyze, and manage capacity of your Hyper-V infrastructure providers and consumers.

The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:

• Managing the capacity of Hyper-V infrastructure providers
• Managing the capacity of Hyper-V infrastructure consumers
• Performing advanced analysis
• Managing the future demand

Managing the capacity of Hyper-V infrastructure providers

You can analyze and manage the capacity of your Hyper-V infrastructure providers by using the Hyper-V view. For the infrastructure data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first set up the data source to collect data.

Step 1. Collect data and install the views

As an Administrator, use one of the following ETLs for data collection:

• BMC-TrueSight-Operations-Management-10-1-10-5-10-7-11-0-11-3-extractor
• Moviri-Integrator-for-BMC-Helix-Capacity-Optimization-Microsoft-SCOM

After data collection starts, data is loaded in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace. 

As an Administrator, you must install the Hyper-V views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and Hyper-V Technology Specialists to access these views.

Step 2. Analyze the collected data

To get a high-level view of the infrastructure usage and health, use the out-of-the-box capacity pools in the Capacity-Pools-view. For detailed analysis, use the Hyper-V-Overview view.

The following common use cases are described here:

Managing the capacity of Hyper-V infrastructure consumers

You can analyze and manage the capacity of your Hyper-V infrastructure consumers (virtual machines) by using the capacity views. For the infrastructure data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first configure data collection.

Step 1. Collect data and install the views

As an Administrator, you can use the following data sources to collect data for your Hyper-V virtual machines:

• BMC-TrueSight-Operations-Management-10-1-10-5-10-7-11-0-11-3-extractor: Configure and run this ETL to collect the required configuration and performance metrics from virtual machines.

• BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser: Configure and run this ETL to collect additional metrics, more accurate memory utilization metrics, and performance metrics at a higher granularity.
  For example, use this ETL to collect the OS-level real memory usage values that are used to generate overallocated VM recommendations. Before you use this ETL, you must instrument the VMs. 

  Instrumenting VMs

  The memory utilization value that is collected from an instrumented VM is based on the actual memory of the VM. The Agent collects resource consumption breakdown at process or workload level and helps you to detect specific in-guest OS level resource constraints (for example, in-guest paging due to the physical memory configuration of the VM being too low).
  The memory utilization value from a non-instrumented VM is based on the data collected by the hypervisor. This value might be over-reported and the VM might not be detected as overallocated. BMC recommends that you instrument your business-critical VMs to collect OS-level memory usage values. 
  
  To instrument a VM: 
   1. Install a Capacity Agent inside the VM from which you want to collect metrics
   2. Configure the Gateway Server and Capacity Agent to initiate data collection. For more information, see Collecting-data-via-Capacity-Agents. 
   3. Configure and use the out-of-the-box BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect the required metrics from the VM.

• Moviri-Integrator-for-BMC-Helix-Capacity-Optimization-Microsoft-SCOM: Configure and run this ETL to collect the required configuration and performance metrics from virtual machines.

After data collection starts, data is loaded in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace.

As an Administrator, you must install the Hyper-V views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and Hyper-V Technology Specialists to access these views.

In the Workspace:

• Virtual machines whose data is collected by the ETLs and VIS Files parser are represented by the Virtual Machines - Hyper-V system type.
• Instrumented VMs are represented by the Virtual Node - Hyper-V system type.
• If you have configured the ETLs to share the same entity catalog, then these two system types, Virtual Machine - Hyper-V and Virtual Node - Hyper-V, are internally linked and you can view their relationship for each VM.

Step 2. Analyze the collected data

Use the capacity views to analyze the imported Hyper-V virtual machine data. Depending on the data source, you can use the Hyper-V Overview view or the Servers Overview view for analysis.

To view and analyze the key capacity metrics and charts for Hyper-V VMs, use the Hyper-V-Overview view. It displays metrics that are collected by the ETLs and VIS files parser.

To view and analyze the granular metrics (actual memory utilization value, workload data, and process level data) that are collected from an instrumented VM, use the Servers Overview view. The Hyper-V Overview view does not display these metrics.

The following common use cases are described here.

Performing advanced analysis

The earlier sections explained how you can use the out-of-the-box capacity views to manage your environment. These capacity views help you analyze your Hyper-V infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.

To perform advanced analysis on the imported Hyper-V data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, you can use Analysis.

Here are some use cases for which you can create and use Analyses:

For more examples, see Creating-an-analysis.

Managing the future demand

By using the capacity views and analysis charts, you can analyze the data of your existing capacity. To predict and plan your IT resource needs, you can use models as described in the following use case.

Predicting the behavior of your resources

Use Models to predict service performance and obtain forecasts of historical series of metrics, including deep details on the modeling techniques used in forecasts and how to interpret the results of model runs.

For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.

Further reading

Best Practices for using the Capacity Pools view