Managing the capacity of your KVM infrastructure
As a Capacity Planner or KVM Technology Specialist, you can use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your KVM infrastructure.
As described in the flow diagram, the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization data source (ETL or Gateway Server) collects data from the KVM infrastructure elements. The collected data is transferred to BMC Helix Continuous Optimization 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.
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables you to collect and analyze data from KVM infrastructure elements:
- Providers that are infrastructure elements with the physical resources, such as CPU, memory, storage, and that provide these resources to a Consumer. For example, host.
- Consumers that are logical or virtual infrastructure elements that consume or use the resources provided by a Provider. For example, virtual machine.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Collecting the data of KVM infrastructure providers
As an Administrator, use one of the following methods for data collection:
- Using the out-of-the-box ETLs:
- Using the Continuous Optimization Agents
After data collection starts, data is loaded daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.
Collecting the data of KVM infrastructure consumers
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-10-7-11-0-11-3-extractor
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization extractor service
Before you use this ETL, you must instrument the 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). We recommend that you instrument your business-critical VMs to collect OS-level memory usage values.
To instrument a VM
- Install a Continuous Optimization Agent inside the VM from which you want to collect metrics.
- Configure the Gateway Server and Continuous Optimization Agent to initiate data collection.
For more information, see Collecting data via Continuous Optimization Agents. - Configure and use the out-of-the-box BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect the required metrics from the VM.
After data collection starts, data is loaded daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.
Performing advanced analysis
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:
Analyze the physical CPU utilization of a host
The following video explains how to create an analysis to analyze the physical CPU utilization of a 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
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.
Forecast the saturation for a resource
The following video explains how to create a model to predict when a resource of a host completely saturates.
For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.