Managing the capacity of your RHEV infrastructure

The BMC Helix Capacity Optimization data source collects data from the RHEV 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 functionalities to review, analyze, and manage capacity of your RHEV infrastructure providers and consumers.

The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:

• Managing the capacity of RHEV infrastructure providers
• Managing the capacity of RHEV infrastructure consumers 
• Performing advanced analysis
• Managing the future demand 

Managing the capacity of RHEV infrastructure providers

RHEV uses KVM as an underlying hypervisor. Therefore, data about KVM hosts that are managed by RHEV is displayed in the KVM views. You can analyze and manage the capacity of your RHEV 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, configure and use one of the following methods for data collection:

• Using the out-of-the-box ETLs:
  • Red-Hat-Enterprise-Virtualization-Extractor-service
  • BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser
• 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 RHEV 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 view.

The following common use cases are described here:

Managing the capacity of RHEV infrastructure consumers

RHEV uses KVM as an underlying hypervisor. Therefore, configuration and performance data of KVM virtual machines that are managed by RHEV is displayed in the KVM views. You can analyze and manage the capacity of your RHEV virtual machines by using the KVM 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 from the KVM virtual machines managed by RHEV:

• Red-Hat-Enterprise-Virtualization-Extractor-service: Configure and run this ETL to collect the required configuration and performance metrics from VMs.
• 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.

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. 

In the Workspace:

• Virtual machines whose data is collected by the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - Extractor service ETL are represented by the Virtual Machines - RHEV system type.
• Instrumented VMs are represented by the Virtual Node - RHEV system type.
• If you have configured the ETLs to share the same entity catalog, then these two system types, Virtual Machine - RHEV and Virtual Node - RHEV, are internally linked and you can view their relationship for each VM.

As an Administrator, you must install the KVM views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and RHEV 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 managed by RHEV. 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. 

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.

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 RHEV infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.

To perform advanced analysis on the imported KVM data managed by RHEV, 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.

Managing the future demand

By using the capacity views and analysis charts, you can analyze the data of your existing capacity. 

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

Best practices for using the Capacity Pools view