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:
Managing the capacity of KVM infrastructure providers
Task 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 Continuous Optimization Agents
After data collection starts, data is loaded daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.
As an administrator, install the KVM views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and KVM Technology Specialists to access these views.
Task 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-views.
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 data of KVM infrastructure consumers
Task 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-10-7-11-0-11-3-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.
As an administrator, install the KVM views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and KVM Technology Specialists to access these views.
Task 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 view. It displays metrics collected by the BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser ETL.
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 Server-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
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.