Using Container Manager to Trend Application Resource Consumption

You can use Container Manager in your test environment as a tool to help trend application resource consumption by doing the following:

1. Installing and setting up the Container Manager software along with any required software.

   For information, see Chapter 2, Container Manager Installation and Setup.

2. Installing Performance Reporting Manager on all agent machines you want to monitor.

   For more information, see Chapter 2, Container Manager Installation and Setup and Sun Management Center 3.6.1 Performance Reporting Manager User’s Guide.

3. Creating an active application-based container for the application you want to trend. In the New Creation wizard, make a minimum CPU reservation only. Do not set a memory cap.

   For more information, see Creating an Application-Based Project and To Create an Application-Based Project.

4. Monitoring the resources used for a couple of weeks with daily, weekly, or real-time graphs. Two graphs, one for CPU and memory resources used, are available for the container that is running on an individual host. You can also view the Processes table to monitor processes running in the application.

   For more information, see To Request a Resource Utilization Report for an Active Project and Viewing Project Processes.

5. After you have established the maximum physical memory requirement for the application, modify the container's properties to include a memory cap. Do not set a cap that is less than the maximum memory the application has been using.

   For more information, see To Modify a Project Using a Property Sheet.

6. Setting an alarm so you are notified if the memory used starts to exceed the memory cap set. Make any adjustments to the memory cap using the Properties sheet.

   For more information, see To Set an Alarm Threshold and To Modify a Project Using a Property Sheet.

After you have established resource utilization trends by using Container Manager, you can use containers to consolidate servers in your production environment.

For more information about how to plan and execute a server consolidation, you can read the Sun Blueprints book Consolidation in the Data Center by David Hornby and Ken Pepple. For more information about server consolidation on systems running the ORACLE database, you can read the Sun white paper Consolidating Oracle RDBMS Instances Using Solaris Resource Manager Software.