White Paper on Memory Usage

6/19/2008

Abstract:
This paper was written to compare customer environments with regards to memory usage for the Interactive Application running on Metaframe servers in the Hosting environment.

Data Information:
A sample group of servers was chosen at random and the following information was obtained from these servers using two methods. Calculations were made from the both groupings of data, each section will show the calculation methods used. As a best practice on physical machines memory utilization should not exceed 90%. The remaining 10% of unused memory is to manage runaway processes, unexpected errors, less utilization of memory paging swap file, and memory available to avoid a system abort.

1. HP OpenView data collection occurred on 6/17/2008 a. Physical Memory as reported by HP OpenView b. Max Memory used at time of sample c. Memory (MB)Avail from Peak d. 90% of available memory for process use e. Total users at time of sample

2. Hyena System Reporting data collection occurred on 6/23/2008 a. System Processes and memory utilization for each b. Application process requirements for and c. Total memory used for system and application processes d. Total users at time of sample

3. Calculations a. Total memory available after 90% ruled applied b. Total memory available after 90% rule applied with system and application processes subtracted c. Average memory used for system processes d. Average memory used for application per customer e. Potential additional user capacity per customer per server f. Potential customer average per server with 90% of memory used

As of this writing its unknown if HP OpenView has the capability to monitor multiple individual processes for reporting purposes.

Data Integrity:
Since both of the data categories were collected at different times, the data may not reflect complete memory usage for the executable processes. The findings in the white paper will provide data for future considerations on deployment of servers in the Hosting environment.

Sample Servers:
Sample servers were chosen at random and for no particular reason other than they host Interactive. Two other servers were chosen in this study because they run the application. The purpose of choosing these servers was to compare the memory footprint of the different applications. All but one of the servers are physical, a virtual production server was chosen to view the memory configuration and memory consumption. The servers are listed in the following section. Also, two Cigna NetworX servers were chosen to compare the NetworX footprint. At the time of the sample it was unknown which processes were required to measure the NetworX footprint. The servers are still in the study but have no application information attached to them. No charts will be made available for the Cigna servers.

This paper can be used in conjunction with the Metaframe usage review written on 4/21/2008 to make recommendations for future considerations about reduction of server farm for particular customers, and increase of virtual server deployments given the technology gains seen in recent versions of VMware ESX server.

Cursory Review of Data:

1. Users per server data was gathered over a 14 day time period with 5 minute intervals set for reporting. Due to limitations with HP OpenView the actual time intervals were 10 minutes and an average number of users within the intervals were reported. Each user count was rounded up to get a better picture of an actual number.

2. Application and System processes were gathered from Hyena system reporting tool.

3. System configuration memory as reported by HP OpenView is not displaying the entire 4 gigabytes of memory which is the standard for Hosted Metaframe servers.