PROCESSOR RESOURCE CAPACITY MANAGEMENT IN AN INFORMATION HANDLING SYSTEM

• US 20120210331A1
• Filed: 04/21/2012
• Published: 08/16/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 02/09/2011
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Davidson, Grover Cleveland II, Michel, Dirk, Olszewski, Bret Ronald, Villarreal, Marcos A.
• Application Number:
  US13/452,880
• Publication Number:
  US 20120210331A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 718/104
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4881 Scheduling strategies for dispatcher, e.g. round robin, multi-level priority queues
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/5077 Logical partitioning of resources; Management or configuration of virtualized resources specific details on emulation or internal functioning of virtual machines G06F9/455

Abstract

An operating system or virtual machine of an information handling system (IHS) initializes a resource manager to provide processor resource utilization management during workload or application execution. The resource manager captures short term interval (STI) and long term interval (LTI) processor resource utilization data and stores that utilization data within an information store of the virtual machine. If a capacity on demand mechanism is enabled, the resource manager modifies a reserved capacity value. The resource manager selects previous STI and LTI values for comparison with current resource utilization and may apply a safety margin to generate a reserved capacity or target resource utilization value for the next short term interval (STI). The hypervisor may modify existing virtual processor allocation to match the target resource utilization.

Claims

1. A method of managing processor resources in an information handling system (IHS), comprising:

loading a virtual machine in the IHS, the virtual machine including a plurality of virtual processors;

executing, by a processor of the plurality of virtual processors, a workload;

storing, by a resource manager, short term interval (STI) information that includes processor resource usage over at least one first predetermined time interval;

storing, by the resource manager, long term interval (LTI) information that includes processor resource usage over at least one second predetermined time interval that is longer than the at least one first predetermined time interval;

determining, by the resource manager, a reserved processor resource capacity that corresponds to a capacity related to the LTI information;

selecting, by the resource manager, STI information of at least one first predetermined time interval as previous short term interval (PSTI) information;

selecting, by the resource manager, LTI information of at least one second predetermined time interval as previous long term interval (PLTI) information; and

determining, by the resource manager, a minimum processor resource capacity by selecting the larger of the PSTI information and the PLTI information as the minimum processor resource capacity.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising adjusting the physical processor resources to match a target physical processor count (PPC) for a next STI.

3. The method of claim 2 applying, by the resource manager, a safety margin to the minimum processor resource capacity to generate a target physical processor consumed (PPC) value, the applying of the safety margin being implemented before adjusting the physical processor resources to match the target PPC for the next STI.

4. The method of claim 2, further comprising:

determining, by the resource manager, if a capacity on demand (COD) function is enabled, and in response to a finding that the COD function is enabled, scaling the reserved processor resource capacity to reduce minimum processor resource capacity.

5. The method of claim 2, wherein the processor resources include at least one of processors, physical processor cores, virtual processor cores and software threads.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing, by the resource manager, a different safety margin for each of a plurality of workloads.

7. The method of claim 2, wherein the adjusting of the physical processor resources further comprises retaining, by the resource manager, control of unused processor resources that result from the adjusting of the physical processor resources.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising receiving, by a vendor of the resource manager, a benefit in return for the executing of the workload exceeding a licensed capacity for physical processors of the IHS.