Managing the capacity of your AIX infrastructure

As the flow diagram indicates, the TrueSight Capacity Optimization data source collects data from the IBM Power Series hosts (frames) and their partitions. The collected data is transferred to the TrueSight Capacity Optimization data warehouse where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. You can use the product functionalities to review, analyze, and manage capacity of your AIX infrastructure providers and consumers.

The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:

• Managing the capacity of AIX infrastructure providers
• Managing the capacity of AIX infrastructure consumers
• Performing advanced analysis
• Managing the future demand

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, configure and use the 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 Capacity Agents to collect data from the Hardware Management Console (HMC) that manages IBM PowerVM frames. The Hardware Management Console (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. It allows third-party software like TrueSight Capacity Optimization to collect data from it remotely by issuing commands using SSH. The HMC provides configuration data and some utilization related data about the frames and the partitions running on the 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, an 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 in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace. 

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:

Managing the capacity of AIX infrastructure consumers

You can analyze and manage the capacity of your AIX infrastructure consumers (partitions) by using the capacity views. For the infrastructure data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first configure data collection.

Step 1. Collect data and install the views

As an Administrator, you can use the following data sources to collect data from the AIX partitions:

• TrueSight Operations Management ETLs: 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. TrueSight Capacity 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.

  Instrumenting partitions

  To instrument a partition: 
   1. Install a Capacity Agent inside the partition from which you want to collect metrics.
   2. Configure the Gateway Server and Capacity Agent to initiate data collection. For more information, see Collecting-data-via-Capacity-Agents. 
   3. 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 in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace.

Step 2. Analyze the collected data

Use the capacity views to analyze the partitions data. Depending on the data source, you can use the following pages for analysis: AIX-PowerVM-view and AIX-WPAR-view

The following common use cases are described here.

Performing advanced analysis

The earlier sections explained how you can use the out-of-the-box capacity views to manage your environment. These capacity views help you analyze your AIX infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.

To perform advanced analysis on the imported AIX 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 Analyses:

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, you can use models as described in the following use case:

For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.

Further reading

Best practices for using the Capacity Pools view