Managing the capacity of your XenServer infrastructure

As a Capacity Planner or XenServer Technology Specialist, you can use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your XenServer infrastructure. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables you to collect and analyze data from XenServer infrastructure elements:

  • Providers (hosts)
  • Consumers (virtual machines)

As described in the flow diagram, the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization data source (ETL or Gateway Server) collects data from the XenServer infrastructure elements. The collected data is transferred to the 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 XenServer infrastructure providers and consumers.

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For details, see the following sections:

Collecting the data for XenServer infrastructure providers

As an Administrator, use one of the following methods for data collection:

After data collection starts, data is loaded daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.

Collecting the data for XenServer infrastructure consumers

As an Administrator, you can use the following data sources to collect data for your XenServer virtual machines:

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

  1. Install a Continuous Optimization Agent inside the VM from which you want to collect metrics.
  2. Configure the Gateway Server and Continuous Optimization Agent to initiate data collection.
    For more information, see Collecting data via Continuous Optimization Agents. 
  3. 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 XenServer data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, you can use Analysis.

The following use case explains how to analyze the CPU utilization of xen virtual machines over time:

Information

This video describes the functionality of TrueSight Capacity Optimization, but it is valid for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization too.

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. To predict and plan your IT resource needs, use Models.

Predicting the behavior of your resources

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.

The following use case explains how to determine when a virtual machine is underutilizing the resources.

InformationThis video describes the functionality of TrueSight Capacity Optimization, but it is valid for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization too.

For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.


 

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