Server Virtualization

With its roots in mainframes dating back to the 1960s, server virtualization today is a strategic answer to consolidating under-utilized servers, reducing energy consumption, and trimming data center space requirements. Many IT organizations are turning to virtualization in hopes of reaping great benefits.

To mitigate risk of failure and maximize ROI requires up-front capacity planning and subsequent proactive performance management.

You want to know that virtualized systems will meet service levels. Capacity planning can ensure that physical and virtual servers are optimally configured for meeting the needs of your users. And a heterogeneous IT Service Optimization solution can help you keep multi-vendor virtualization solutions running smoothly across multiple data centers.

Right-sizing Hardware

Failing to make sure your IT infrastructure is the right size for your business has a negative affect on profitability. Too little capacity and you suffer poor response, low productivity, and lost business. Too much capacity and you unnecessarily increase complexity, decrease manageability, and waste both time and money. Since many licensing fees are tied to server size, software licensing costs alone can bring significant savings when equipment is accurately sized.

Whether you are undergoing a hardware refresh, consolidating servers, or purchasing hardware for new application roll-outs, it is extremely valuable to have objective data for determining the right amount of capacity to purchase and the right hardware and software configuration to use to get the most benefit from your IT investment.

Server Consolidation

Server consolidation continues to be a hot issue, primarily due to the potential cost-savings in hardware, software, staffing and facilities. Other reasons to consolidate include improved manageability, better service, and increased agility to adapt to changing business needs.
Beyond the political landscape and personnel issues, stacking applications can cause critical performance risks if you are not careful. You don't want to sacrifice service in the interest of consolidation.

To minimize the risks associated with server consolidation, it is important to understand which servers are good candidates for consolidation and how combined applications and workloads will compete for resources, so service levels can be maintained

Ongoing Capacity Management

Many variables affecting services are in constant flux and can affect IT resource allocation, making ongoing capacity management very important.
Performing ongoing capacity management includes these business benefits:

1. Higher utilization rates on IT assets, allowing the data center to do more with less and improving IT service unit cost positions
2. Consistent service delivery, providing uninterrupted service through peak demands
3. More efficient processes and reporting, ensuring consistency across capacity, performance, chargeback and incident reports
4. Continuous runtime improvement of applications and infrastructure resource consumption, improving performance and delaying expensive capacity upgrades
5. Accurate capacity provisioning, allowing timely capacity upgrades and related cost information to the business for more informed decisions
6. More accurate input for total cost of ownership analyses, allowing more informed decisions to be made regarding proposed new IT-related initiatives
7. Bottleneck detection for higher service demand scenarios, allowing enough time to correct problems before services are adversely affected
8. Business and IT alignment, focusing greater attention and resources in business-critical services
9. Agile data center, adapting more quickly to changes in demand or technology

As business forecasts, technology and other factors change over time, those changes must be incorporated into revised capacity plans. Otherwise, firefighting and inefficiencies will prevail.
Adjusting capacity requirements is important to ensuring that risk levels align with business priorities. If a critical service shows substantial growth in demand, capacity plans should be adjusted to reduce the risk of falling short of service-level requirements, allow for unexpected spikes, and ensure uninterrupted quality of service. Services of lesser importance do not require such close attention.

Why should Capacity Management implement first ?

ITIL Capacity Management offers quick, early wins that have often generated enough cost savings (in the millions of dollars in our experience) to fund the remainder of your ITIL project. Recovering implementation costs early and demonstrating success also helps gain momentum for the project, encourage senior management to stay the course, and alleviate organizational resistance. These benefits make Capacity Management a good candidate for a pilot implementation.

Why should I implement Capacity Management?

Immediate and long term benefits include lower costs, more consistent levels of service and improved service quality. Processes allow you to:

• Get more out of existing IT resources and improve IT cost per service unit positions
• Fine tune applications and infrastructure components to improve performance, reduce consumption, and delay upgrades
• Eliminate redundant work and ensure consistent reporting
• Efficiently provision capacity
• Provide timely capacity and related cost information for more informed business decisions
• Provide more complete input to TCO of proposed new and/or major IT-related upgrades or initiatives
• Project consumption at future growth levels and uncover bottlenecks with sufficient warning to correct before business services are adversely affected

Capacity management teams have close ties to ITIL Service Level Management and Financial Management areas. Through Capacity Management processes, more thorough service level and associated financial information is available to the business, permitting business leaders to make more informed decisions.

What is ITIL Capacity Management

Capacity Management is one of five components in the ITIL Service Delivery area. The work is proactive rather than reactive in nature and is responsible for ensuring that business needs and service definitions are fulfilled using a minimum of computing resources.
Capacity Management activities include:

• Monitoring, analyzing, tuning, and implementing necessary changes in resource utilization
• Managing demand for computing resources, which requires an understanding of business priorities
• Modeling to simulate infrastructure performance and understand future resource needs
• Application sizing to ensure required service levels can be met
• Storing capacity management data
• Producing a capacity plan that documents current utilization and forecasted requirements, as well as support costs for new applications or releases
• Building the annual infrastructure growth plan with input from other teams

Capacity Management - Task & SubTask

Sreps for a Performance Evaluation

1. State the goals of the study and define the system boundaries.
2. List system services and possible outcomes.
3. Select performance metrics.
4. List system and workload parameters.
5. Select factors and their values.
6. Select evaluation techniques.
7. Select the workload.
8. Design the experiments.
9. Analyze and interpret the data.
10. Present the results. Start Over, if necessary.

Concurrent Request (Batch Management) Performance Check

1. Structure - Run list_queues and verify that the active queues are relevant

2. Critical jobs defined - Run display_rule and verify that the rule is properly populated

3. Concurrent Manager Jobs

Review large tables - Purge jobs ,Partitioning , Indexing (reverse index ?)

4. Resource Groups

Is it implemented ?

Are All queues setup to specify the right resource group ?

Are OLTP users being sent to the group ?

5. Queue Managers

Workflow listeners - Review WF_DEFFERRED for pending transactions , Review table

WF_DEFERRED for HWM issue

SFM listeners - Make sure all SFM Listeners are disabled if Install Base is not installed

Transaction Managers - Make sure all transaction manager properly configured

6. Concurrent Manager Runtime Efficiency

Check for Incompatibe times ( Running high resource job during peak hour)

7. Jobs fit queues - Fast jobs in fast queue , Slow jobs in slow queue

8. Backlogs - Check any backlog for Critical jobs queue , Fast jobs queue , All other queue