From: Joshua Clark (jclark@hyperkitten.com)
Date: Fri Dec 02 2005 - 08:20:41 EST
I'm beginning an initiative to consolidate our many small Sun servers onto
fewer, larger machines. Our current server roster has grown to the point
where cooling, a/c power, and increased management complexity have become
major issues. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat as we are. I
thought I'd run this by the group to see if anyone has already tackled
this question rather than try to reinvent the wheel so to speak.
My first step was to identify what we have and who is using it. Having
finished that, my next step is to determine what the utilization is on
each machine. This step will identify which machines are good candidates
for consolidation, and will also help determine which are under sized
sized.
I figure that sar is the best way to capture usage statistics over time.
By default sar only holds reports for 7 days so I modified the sa2 script
to remove reports after 60 days. My current plan is to write a script that
will parse each /var/adm/sa file and generate a .csv file that I can
import into Excel. I'm initially planning to capture %idle and %wio.
I have a couple of questions:
1) Is there an easier way to do this? Is there a script or package out
there that's freely available that will capture the statistics I need?
2) Is there some sort of industry-standard metric I can use to summarize
system utilization? Is there a generally accepted formula I can apply to
these statistics and come up with an average utilization number for a
server?
3) Are there other metrics you would suggest capturing besides CPU usage
and i/o wait?
I would greatly appreciate any feedback you can provide on these
questions. I know I'm not alone in this and that some of you are facing
the same problems as I am. I'll gladly summarize to the list and make
available any scripts I create that might be useful to other SA's.
Thanks,
Joshua Clark
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