Managing the capacity of your KVM infrastructure
As a Capacity Planner or KVM Technology Specialist, you can use BMC Helix Capacity Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your KVM infrastructure. BMC Helix Capacity Optimization enables you to collect and analyze data from KVM infrastructure elements:
- Providers (hosts)
- Consumers (virtual machines)
As described in the flow diagram, the BMC Helix Capacity Optimization data source (ETL or Gateway Server) collects data from the KVM infrastructure elements. 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 features to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your KVM infrastructure providers and consumers.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Managing the capacity of KVM infrastructure providers
You can analyze and manage the capacity of your KVM infrastructure providers by using the KVM views. 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 methods for data collection:
- Using the out-of-the-box ETLs:
- Using the Capacity Agents
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 KVM views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and KVM 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, see KVM Overview.
The following common use cases are described here:
Understand the usage and health of your KVM infrastructure providers
Review and analyze the out-of-the-box capacity pools for KVM hosts for a high-level understanding of their health and usage. For more information, see Capacity-Pools-view.
You can drill down into a specific host for detailed analysis.
An Administrator can create capacity pools as per your requirement. You can then view and analyze them in the Capacity Pools view.
Understand resource availability, utilization, and utilization trend of your KVM infrastructure providers
Review and analyze the resource metrics of KVM providers on the Host-page-in-the-KVM-Overview-view page in the KVM Overview view.
Identify the KVM providers that have exhausted or exhausting resources
Use the Future-Saturations-page-in-the-KVM-Overview-view to get a quick view of the KVM hosts that have exhausted or exhausting resources (CPU, memory, and storage).
Managing the capacity of KVM infrastructure consumers
You can analyze and manage the capacity of your KVM 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 KVM virtual machines:
- BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser
- BMC-TrueSight-Operations-Management-10-1-10-5-10-7-11-0-11-3-extractor
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization extractor service
Before you use this ETL, you must instrument the VMs.
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 KVM views and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and KVM Technology Specialists to access these views.
Step 2. Analyze the collected data
Use the capacity views to analyze the imported data of KVM virtual machines. Depending on the data source, you can use the KVM Overview view or the Servers Overview view for analysis.
To view and analyze the key capacity metrics and charts for KVM VMs, use the KVM-Overview view. It displays metrics collected by the BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser ETL.
To view and analyze the granular metrics (actual memory utilization value, workload data, and process level data) that are collected from the VM, use the Servers-Overview-view.
The following common use cases are described here.
Determine and analyze the available resources and their utilization per VM
Review and analyze the relevant metrics on the Virtual-Machines-page-in-the-KVM-Overview-view to determine the available resources and their utilization per VM. For example, utilization metrics for CPU and memory.
Identify the KVM VMs that have exhausting resources
Review the Future-Saturations-page-in-the-KVM-Overview-view to identify KVM virtual machines that have exhausting resources (CPU, memory, storage). The page also provides actionable recommendations to help you handle them.
Analyze the trend and behavior of the actual (OS-level) memory utilization of KVM VMs
Review the Servers views to review and analyze the trend and behavior of the actual memory utilization of the KVM virtual machines.
These views display data that is collected from instrumented VMs.
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 KVM infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.
To perform advanced analysis on the imported KVM 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 Analysis:
For more examples, see Creating-an-analysis.
Analyze the physical CPU utilization of the host over time and understand the trend
Analyze the resource utilization pattern of KVM hosts or partitions
- Create an analysis.
See sample configuration values:
- Review the analysis results.
The analysis results are shown in a tabular format. The summary table shows the resource utilization metric values for a host. The page shows the memory usage of the host.
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, use Models.
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.
How to determine when a resource of a host completely saturates
For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.
Further reading