MLC Planning tool

Use the MLC Planning tool to create interactive and customizable cost optimization plans where you can perform cost-reduction exercises.

The MLC Planning tool provides the following plan types:

  • LPAR and Workload plans
  • Job and STC plans

When creating either type of plan, you select a complete usage month, evaluation cost table, workload type, and CPCs. The MLC Planning tool then enables you to perform operations on these objects. The operations you can perform depend on the plan type. The following sections describe the features of each type of plan and details the operations that can be performed in them:

Related topic

 Developing-cost-reduction-plans

LPAR and Workload plans

You can use LPAR and Workload cost optimization plans to:

  • Evaluate the effects of expected workload growth or decline
  • Estimate the effects of different cost-reduction actions

Each plan uses existing historical monthly models as a starting point or baseline for exercises that demonstrate the effects of changes to your system. You can perform the following actions to see the effects on your monthly costs:

  • Delete LPARs from a CPC
  • Move LPARs to another CPC
  • Clone an LPAR
  • Introduce or change the Defined Capacity of an LPAR
  • Delete workloads from an LPAR
  • Move the whole workload or part of it to a different LPAR on the same or on a different CPC
  • Scale (increase or decrease) workload activity
  • Scale (increase or decrease) mobile reduction activity
  • Delete or move MLC product licenses when deleting or moving workloads

Note

As you perform exercises in the plan, you can view the results of any action immediately. If necessary, you can undo any action to restore the plan to a previous point in the exercise. For more information, see Overview-of-LPAR-and-Workload-plans.

After performing any of these actions, the MLC Planning tool evaluates the cost model and then generates a Plan Evaluation Summary Report that contains the cumulative results. You can view the report after each operation, or add multiple operations and then view all of the results.

The Plan Evaluation Summary Report shows the cumulative effects of:

  • All operations of the plan on the individual MLC product costs
  • All previous changes on the individual Workloads, LPARs, and CPCs

At any time during the exercise, you can also view charts and data that detail the effects of the operations. You can compare:

  • Peak CPC R4HA values and their dates and time
  • Aggregated CPC R4HA charts
  • R4HA charts for individual LPARs and their contribution to CPC Peak R4HA

  • R4HA charts of individual workloads and their contribution to CPC Peak value

    Note

    Depending on your changes and on Workload/LPAR Utilization patterns, new peaks can appear at different moments during the usage month.

Job and STC plans

You can use Job and STC Cost Optimization Plans to:

  • Evaluate modifications to the existing batch workload configurations
  • Estimate the effects of different cost-reduction actions

Each plan uses existing historical monthly models as a starting point or baseline for exercises that demonstrate the effects of changes to your system. You can perform the following actions to see the effects on your monthly costs:

  • Delay the execution of batch jobs
  • Move batch jobs to a different LPAR on the same or different CPC
  • Scale batch jobs
  • Delete batch jobs from a system

After execution of any of these operations, the plan is re-evaluated and the cost impact report will be generated.

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