Managing the capacity of your AIX infrastructure
As a Capacity Planner or AIX Technology Specialist, use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your AIX infrastructure.
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables you to collect and manage data for the AIX infrastructure elements:
- Providers (AIX hosts and pools)
- Consumers (Logical and workload partitions)
IBM Power Series hosts (frames) are large servers that support virtualized partitions. These partitions run operating systems. An IBM Power Series host can be partitioned into logical partitions (LPARs) in the following ways:
- Dedicated mode: Processors are assigned entirely to partitions. The partitions are called dedicated partitions or DLPARs.
- Shared dedicated mode: Partitions might donate their spare CPU cycles to others.
- Shared mode: Fractions of processing units are assigned as entitlements from a shared pool. The partitions are called shared processor partitions or SPLPARs.
The operating system (AIX, IBM, or Linux) running within an LPAR might further perform workload partitioning. Certain special partitions are dedicated to virtual I/O. These partitions, called VIO (Virtual I/O) Servers, manage physical storage and network resources and mediate access to these by other partitions. These partitioning schemes let business workloads use the CPU, memory, storage, and network resources managed by the hosts.
As the flow diagram indicates, the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization data source collects data from the IBM Power Series hosts (frames) and their partitions. The collected data is transferred to BMC Helix Continuous Optimization where it is processed and then displayed on the user interface. If you want more granular data, you need to collect data from the Hardware Management Console (HMC).
The HMC is a separate management station for administering a number of IBM Power frames. An HMC is required in any substantial Power series installation. The HMC has embedded software that does not support agents or other third-party additions. You can run SSH commands to remotely collect data from the HMC by using a third-party software like BMC Helix Continuous Optimization. The HMC provides configuration data and some utilization-related data about the frames and the partitions running on the frames.
Use the product functionalities to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your AIX infrastructure providers and consumers.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Collecting the data of AIX infrastructure providers
As an administrator, first set up the data source to collect data. Configure and use one of the following methods for data collection:
- TrueSight Operations Management extractors: Configure and use these ETLs to collect the configuration and performance metrics from AIX hosts and pools.
- BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser: Configure and use this ETL to collect additional metrics, more accurate memory utilization metrics, and performance metrics from AIX hosts and pools at a higher granularity. To collect data at this level, install and configure Continuous Optimization Agents to collect data from the Hardware Management Console (HMC) that manages frames.
Agents can be configured to periodically collect HMC data. The Agent must be installed on any AIX or VIO Server LPAR with network access to the HMC. When collecting HMC data, the Agent collects HMC data only for its own frame. Therefore, each frame needs at least one Agent running on it.
After data collection starts, data is loaded daily, and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.
Collecting the data of AIX infrastructure consumers
As an administrator, use the following data sources to collect data from the AIX partitions:
- TrueSight Operations Management extractors: Configure and use the appropriate ETL to collect the configuration and performance metrics from AIX partitions.
- BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser: Configure and use this ETL to collect additional metrics, more accurate memory utilization metrics, and performance metrics from partitions at a higher granularity. Before you use this ETL, you must instrument partitions in the frame. Data about non-instrumented partitions is collected by HMC. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can collect certain metrics only from instrumented partitions; for example, complete set of metrics for shared processor pools and process-level data. You can use this data for the detailed capacity analysis.
To instrument a partition
- Install a Continuous Optimization Agent inside the partition 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 data from the Gateway Server.
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 AIX data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, use Analysis.
Here are some use cases for which you can create and use Analysis:
Analyze the trend of system metrics
The following video explains how to create an analysis to analyze the trend of AIX system metrics over a specified interval.
Analyze the memory utilization
The following video explains how to create an analysis to analyze the memory usage pattern of an AIX WPAR.
For more examples, see Creating-an-analysis.
Managing the future demand
Use Models to predict the service performance and to obtain forecasts of historical series of metrics. For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.
The following use case describes when a resource of an AIX pool saturates: