2.3.7 Examples of using Agent for Platform - PFM in a virtualized system: Determining whether additional physical resources are needed

If physical resources always seem to be heavily loaded, consider adding another physical resource.

Note, however, that even when a single guest OS or logical partition is heavily loaded in a virtualized system, the system-wide load might seem light. Therefore, check whether all guest OSs or all logical partitions are heavily loaded.

When using PFM - Agent for Platform to check the load status in a virtualized system, you might require a different perspective from the one you use for an ordinary environment.

A virtualized system contains resources that can be changed dynamically, such as processors and memory. Therefore, when monitoring processor and memory usage, also monitor the items not easily affected by dynamic changes in resources, such as the current queue length and paging frequency.

The following graph gives an example of processor resources.

Figure 2‒4: Case in which additional processor resources are recommended (during processor usage monitoring)

In the figure example, the allocation ratio is being switched due to the heavy load on processor usage for logical partition B, but usage is high for both logical partitions A and B. In this kind of case, physical resources are insufficient.

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