Capacity Pools view

Capacity management is fast becoming a key requirement for not just the capacity planner, but for a variety of roles. Users in different roles consume the output of capacity management to varying degrees. Users either directly access capacity views and reports, or automatically receive capacity reports.

To access the view, in the Helix Capacity Optimization Dashboard navigation pane, select Capacity > Views > Capacity Pools. The Capacity Pools view is displayed and lists all the capacity pools and the Usage, Risk and Efficiency indicators for each pool.

You can choose to view the data for a specific domain or tag period by using the corresponding filters. For more information, see Using-filtering-options-in-the-Helix-Capacity-Optimization-Dashboard. You can display capacity pools of a specific pool type by applying the Pool Type filter

See the following sections for an overview of the Capacity Pools view and how you can manage and view the details of capacity pools.

Overview

After you define your infrastructure into segments, or capacity pools, BMC Helix Capacity Optimization automatically analyzes the right metrics on a daily basis and creates high-level indicators on Usage, Risk, and Efficiency, for each capacity pool. These indicators are displayed in a graphical view called the Capacity Pools view.

Using the Capacity Pools view, you can quickly see a list of all the capacity pools in your infrastructure, easily see the capacity utilization of aggregated entities, and effectively manage the capacity of your entire IT infrastructure.

The Capacity Pools view displays the ranking for each capacity pool based on the Usage, Risk, and Efficiency score. Those scores are based on the CPU, Memory, and Disk usage of the capacity pool:

A Usage indicator counts the level of usage per capacity pool, so that you can track which capacity pools have excess capacity available.
A Risk indicator counts any indication that CPU, memory, or disk is either already saturated or will soon be, or that workloads are experiencing capacity contention.
A Capacity Efficiency indicator counts resources that are being wasted, so that efficiency could be improved after a detailed analysis.

From these key indicators, you can navigate to more infrastructure-oriented views. For more information about how you can use these key indicators, see Using Usage, Risk, and Efficiency indicators.

The indicators for Usage and Risk are based on thresholds.

Platform support

BMC Helix Capacity Optimization supports the following technology platforms for capacity pool views: VMware vSphere, IBM AIX on PowerVM, KVM, and Hyper-V.

The following capacity pool types are supported in this view:

AIX Power VM hosts
VMware clusters
VMware hosts
KVM hosts
Hyper-V hosts

You can view all capacity pools that are in your infrastructure, mark some as favorites, view details of a particular capacity pool and so on.

To view all capacity pools

To view all capacity pools, click the All tab and ensure the system type is No filter. The All tab denotes the total number of capacity pools for the selected platform. This is the default option.

You can filter the view by system type.

You can sort the capacity pools based on the Usage, Risk, or Efficiency score in the ascending or descending order.

Example of capacity pools for KVM system type

To mark a capacity pool view as favorite

You can mark any capacity pool view as favorite so that you can access it quickly in the future.

In the Capacity Pools page, click next to the capacity pool name to mark it as a favorite.
Capacity pools that are added as favorites, are marked with a .
To view all favorite pools, click the Favorites tab.
The Favorites tab denotes the number of capacity pools marked as favorite for the selected filter.

To view details of a specific capacity pool

To view more details about a capacity pool, click on the name of that capacity pool. The Pool details page opens and displays the following information:

General details of the capacity pool are displayed, such as name, type, description, and tags
The Summary tab displays core metrics for the selected entity as analysis charts, depending on the available data. The utilization chart is the base chart and displays CPU, memory, and datastore utilization information.
The Configuration Details tab displays the configuration data for the capacity pool
The Contained Elements tab displays a table of elements that are contained in the capacity pool, listing Usage, Risk and Efficiency values for each element.

For more information, see Capacity-Pools-details.