Setup Considerations

To prepare to use Capacity Advisor, consider the following:

Licensing requirements
Installation
Upgrade and Reinstallation
Credentials
Dependencies

Licensing Requirements

Capacity Advisor is installed when all VSE components are installed. You receive a 90–day free trial period for Capacity Advisor. After this period expires, you must have a License To Use (LTU), which comes with activation instructions. For additional information about licensing, see the VSE Management Software Quick Start Guide. You will need an LTU for both Virtualization Manager and Capacity Advisor. Their part numbers and descriptions are as follows:

T2782AC: HP Integrity Essentials Virtualization Manager Agent LTU
T2784AC: HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor Agent LTU

Installation

Capacity Advisor is installed with other VSE components, so no separate installation is required. To use Capacity Advisor, you must have a valid license.

Upgrades and Reinstallation

When upgrading or reinstalling software used with Capacity Advisor, there are different considerations and procedures for the following, described in the next sections:

Updating software on the CMS
Updating agents on the managed nodes

Upgrading Software on the CMS

When VSE is removed and reinstalled, collection of Capacity Advisor data can miss some data on the Central Management System (CMS). To avoid this, back up the VSE Management Software database before removing VSE and restore the database after it is reinstalled, using the following commands:

vseinitconfig —b (before removing VSE)
vseinitconfig —s (after reinstalling VSE)

Upgrading Agents on the Managed Nodes

When upgrading the Utilization Provider to version 1.6.0.0 on a managed node, the data collected on that node that day is lost. Only data after the upgrade is kept. For example, if the Utilization Provider upgrade occurs at 3:00pm UTC on a managed node, the previous 15 hours of data are lost for that node. No data from prior days is lost. The data-gathering "day" starts at midnight UTC. If the upgrade of the Utilization Provider occurs at noon Central Daylight Time (UTC–5), 17 hours of utilization data are lost. To minimize data loss, upgrade the Utilization Provider as soon after UTC midnight as possible.

To minimize missing data, you may use the following procedure:

Procedure 1-1 To Upgrade an Agent on a Managed Node

Collect data from the managed node. For example,
$ capcollect system.to.be.upgraded

Export the utilization data for this day from the system to save it. For example,

$ capprofile -x -b 20070309 -e 20070310 system.to.be.upgraded >/var/tmp/system.profile

Upgrade the utilization provider software on the managed node shortly after UTC midnight, say, on Monday.
Allow capcollect to collect the partial day from the new provider after the UTC day is over, that is, after UTC midnight, say, on Tuesday.
IMPORTANT: This step is crucial, because if you re-import your exported data before the UTC day is over, capcollect will overwrite it when it collects for the day.

Import the saved profile data for the system. For example,

$ capprofile -i -o system.to.be.upgraded </var/tmp/system.profile

Using this procedure is practical only if the cost of losing a day's data is greater than the cost of using the procedure.

Collection Agents

Capacity Advisor uses the same data collection agents as Virtualization Manager and problems associated with agents can be diagnosed with vseassist. See the VSE Management Software Installation and Update Guide Version A.03.00.00 for additional information.

Disk Space Requirements

To collect data for use by Capacity Advisor, plan for about 17 megabytes for each workload. Because Capacity Advisor keeps two years of data, eventually you will need 17.3MB per workload. For definition of a workload, see the VSE glossary. For additional information, see the capcollect manpage and the HP Systems Insight Manager Installation and User Guide.

Credentials

To use Capacity Advisor, collect data, and run reports, you must have credentials (valid user name and password) on systems where you plan to use it. For specifics about credentialing, see the VSE Management Software Quick Start Guide.

Dependencies

Capacity Advisor has the same software and hardware dependencies as Virtualization Manager. These dependencies apply to both managed systems and the CMS. For details, see the VSE Management Software Quick Start Guide.