Synthetic workload generation for capacity planning of virtual server environments

Capacity planning tools aim at monitoring and evaluating computational infrastructures resources in terms of workloads. The Capacity Advisor is a capacity planning tool inside the HP Virtual Server Environment - VSE. This paper describes the development and use of a synthetic workload generator named WGCap (Workload Generator for Capacity Advisor), a flexible synthetic workload generator that generates traces to be imported into the Capacity Advisor for simulating the consumption of resources like CPU demand, memory size, disk data rate and network data rate. The workload generation is reliable and flexible, allowing the generation of workloads based on actual traces or on a significant set of probability distributions and statistical summaries.