Planning a server migration project into a zBX is a difficult task. The interaction of server resource demands must be matched against the capacity of the blades and I/O configuration of the zBX. The possible combinations of server to blade mapping quickly becomes innumerable as the size of the study increases.
Capacity planning concepts are needed as well, accounting for peak period usage, growth scenarios, application specific usage constraints, and business availability requirements.
The IBM zBladeSizer and its associated extract tool, IBM zBladeEXTR, address the complexity issues of the zBX server migration task by searching for the optimal solution from the wide set of possibly combinations. The customer's business controls are used to impose rules on the search to ensure the solution meets the server migration objectives. Measured performance data from the servers is reduced by the extract tool and passed into the analysis tool where a set of statistical profiles are calculated to represent a server's demands for resources.
In this session we will present an overview of the tools and show the tools in action as they map server to blade assignments as part of a server migration project.