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 Optimizationenables 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.

What can you do with BMC Helix Continuous Optimization?

HOCO_goals_21.3.png

The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:

Managing the capacity of AIX infrastructure providers

You can analyze and manage the capacity of your AIX infrastructure providers by using the AIX Infrastructure view. For the infrastructure data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first set up the data source to collect data.

Step 1. Collect data and install the views

As an administrator, first set up the data source to collect data. Configure and use one of the following methods for data collection:

BMC Helix Operations Management extractor: Configure and use this ETL 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.

As an Administrator, you must install the AIX views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and AIX Technology Specialists to access these views.

Step 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, use the AIX-PowerVM-view.

The following common use cases are described here:

Understand the usage and health of your AIX infrastructure providers

Review and analyze the out-of-the-box capacity pools for AIX PowerVM 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 AIX infrastructure providers

Depending on the provider, review and analyze the resource metrics on the relevant page in the AIX views.

For more information, see Hosts-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view, Hosts-page-in-the-AIX-WPAR-view and Pools-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view.

Evaluate the residual or spare capacity of AIX hosts and pools

Use the Hosts-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view and Pools-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view to identify the AIX hosts and pools where you can add additional partitions.

Identifying the AIX PowerVM hosts that have exhausted or exhausting resources

Use the Future-Saturations-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view to get a quick view of the AIX infrastructure providers that have exhausted or exhausting resources (CPU, memory, and storage).

Availability and Utilization

Understand resource availability, utilization, and utilization trend of your AIX infrastructure providers

Depending on the provider, review and analyze the resource metrics on the relevant page in the AIX views.

For more information, see Hosts-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view, Hosts-page-in-the-AIX-WPAR-view and Pools-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view.

Spare Capacity
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Exhausted Resources
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Use the Partitions-Exceeding-Entitlement-page-in-the-AIX-PowerVM-view page to identify the AIX shared pool partitions that have exceeded the CPU entitlement values.

Exhausting Resources
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Performing advanced analysis

To perform advanced analysis on the imported AIX data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, use Analysis. For more information, see Analyzing-domain-data.

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.

Managing the capacity of your AIX infrastructure

Managing the capacity of AIX infrastructure providers

Step 1. Collect data and install the views

Step 2. Analyze the collected data

Understand the usage and health of your AIX infrastructure providers

Understand resource availability, utilization, and utilization trend of your AIX infrastructure providers

Evaluate the residual or spare capacity of AIX hosts and pools

Identifying the AIX PowerVM hosts that have exhausted or exhausting resources

Availability and Utilization

Understand resource availability, utilization, and utilization trend of your AIX infrastructure providers

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Performing advanced analysis

Managing the future demand

On this page

Spare Capacity
Excerpt named space_capacity_aix was not found in document xwiki:IT-Operations-Management.Continuous-Optimization.BMC-Helix-Continuous-Optimization.bhco252.Managing-the-capacity-of-your-infrastructure.Managing-the-capacity-of-your-AIX-infrastructure.WebHome.

Exhausted Resources
Excerpt named exhausted_resources_aix was not found in document xwiki:IT-Operations-Management.Continuous-Optimization.BMC-Helix-Continuous-Optimization.bhco252.Managing-the-capacity-of-your-infrastructure.Managing-the-capacity-of-your-AIX-infrastructure.WebHome.

Exhausting Resources
Excerpt named exhausted_resources_aix_consumers was not found in document xwiki:IT-Operations-Management.Continuous-Optimization.BMC-Helix-Continuous-Optimization.bhco252.Managing-the-capacity-of-your-infrastructure.Managing-the-capacity-of-your-AIX-infrastructure.WebHome.