HP Produce First Sizing and Configuration Tool for Microsoft Hyper-V

Whenever I talk to Partners and Customers about our MAPs tool (The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator), one of the things I’m frequently asked is ‘Will it tell me how big / what spec my servers need to be to run X-number of VMs’, and I say, No, closely followed by ‘There’s typically no perfect answer to that question', the MAPs tool will allow you to input a ‘model’ server spec of your choice, and it will then tell you the numbers you should be expecting along with some useful placement information, however, it would be more definite I suppose, if you could run the MAPs tool, identify the consolidation candidates, and then say, ‘spec me up some servers to run these on, please!’

Now you can.

With the The HP Sizing and Configuration Tool for Microsoft Hyper-V is a downloadable, automated tool that provides a quick and consistent methodology to determine a “best-fit” server configuration for your virtualized Hyper-V environment. This tool enables you to quickly compare different solution configurations and obtain a highly detailed, customizable server and storage solution complete with a detailed bill of materials.

This sizer allows users to create new Hyper-V solutions, open already saved solutions, and use data compiled from other tools like Microsoft’s Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit to build rich Hyper-V configurations built on HP ProLiant server and storage technologies.

The sizer allows rapid comparisons of various Hyper-V characterizations and server platform choices.. You can select and customize configurations for your particular environment by adding or substituting server types, number of servers, and server components.

The sizer was developed from knowledge gained during performance characterization testing of Microsoft Hyper-V in the HP Solutions Engineering lab in Houston, Texas.

Now I’ve had a quick play with this tool, thanks to the fact it plugs in some sample data for you if you don’t have any to hand (which I don’t!).  The sample data consists of:

The great thing is about the sample data is, you can keep clicking the sample data button, and it adds 7 more candidates each time.  Albeit the same 7, but never mind!  You’re inputs would be different to this, and the MAPs data can be imported straight in.  A few more clicks here and there, selecting your desired utilisation levels for storage, network, CPU etc, and if you’ve got preferences of particular hardware types, you can select these, plus whether you want a SAN or not, and out pops your result, which for my sample data, looked like this:

So, I’d need 5 Servers for this particular configuration, and I can get all the info by clicking on Configuration Details, plus see the components I’d need to order to build this solution.  Now I just need to find $80k :-).  A number of the responses I gave were ‘No Preference’ so the SAN choices have been made for me.  Adjusting these to be more accurate on my part, would probably have resulted in a different price, but like most tools, the more you put in, the better results you get out.

This really is a great tool, and I’m sure it will improve over time.  Hopefully other OEMs will follow suit.

You can access the tool here, and as always, credit goes to Patrick from the MVUG for sending this through.