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# Managing planning jobs using a Planning dashboard

Unisphere for PowerMax provides a planning dashboard that allows users to see historical and predicted headroom information and this information can be used to create and manage planning jobs.

## Prerequisites

- See Roles and associated permissions to determine the user roles that can perform this task.

## About this task

Unisphere provides a new planning dashboard, displaying historical and predicted headroom data for each array, helping you make more informed decisions. The new progressive provisioning wizard allows you to quickly determine the best location for a new workload, considering the total system performance of all available candidate storage systems. You can define workloads with minimal input for a rapid suitability check or follow a guided process with automatic port selection for a more detailed configuration. Once you have defined a planning job, you can see the impact of the new workload on the headroom of the array over time, enabling you to plan for optimal performance.

Headroom is the amount (in TB) of a typical workload that can be added to a system without exceeding physical capacity or component performance capacity. Instead of displaying a single current headroom value for each storage system, historical and projected future headroom values are displayed in charts on the planning dashboard. As planning jobs are introduced, you can see how these jobs reduce the remaining projected headroom on each storage system managed by an instance of Unisphere for PowerMax.

The planning dashboard supports new provisioning. The new workflow provides simplified and guided configuration recommendations and dynamically updated performance impact results.

A new metric called storage group impact is calculated and displayed. This value represents the relative impact that each storage group has on its current storage system. A higher value represents a higher impact. This value can be used to identify potential migration candidates.

## Steps

1. Click Planning from the side panel on the home dashboard.
2. On the Planning dashboard, select a time period and view the following information for each storage system:
   - A dashboard displaying headroom charts that display over time the historical remaining headroom and the predicted remaining headroom. The headroom charts for the different systems are displayed in a single section (if no planning job is present) or in two different sections based on which systems are affected by the planning job and which remain unaffected (if a planning job has been created). Click typical workload to see the typical workload details (see View service level workload details),
   - For a selected headroom chart, a new metric called storage group impact is calculated and displayed. This value represents the relative impact that each storage group has on its current storage system. A higher value represents a higher impact. This value can be used to identify potential migration candidates.
3. Select a storage system by clicking the headroom data card of the storage system and viewing the Storage Group Impacts values in the Details panel.
   The Planning dashboard can be in one of the following states:
   - A planning dashboard with no existing planning job. Click Provision.
   - A planning dashboard with a saved Planning Job in a Ready to Run state. Go to step 12.
   - A planning dashboard with a saved Planning Job in an Invalid state. Click Replan.

   | NOTE: If the saved planning job is not run or not added to the job list, it is possible (based on other changes to the environment) that the selected systems may no longer be the recommended systems and the saved job may transition to an Invalid state.

4. Specify the required capacity.
5. Specify the workload details.
6. Specify the workload performance by specifying the IOPS or by using the workload from a selected provisioning template (that has been previously created) and click OK.
7. Specify the hosts and ports.
   A list of recommended (suitable) systems is displayed. Unsuitable systems are also displayed.
8. For a recommended system, click the arrow button next to Select to see a diagram summarizing performance impact and configuration information.
9. Click Select to select one of the recommended systems and click Next.
10. A Customize page is displayed that has a diagram summarizing performance impact and configuration information . The associated configuration and status information is displayed in the following tabs:
    - Next Steps—The next steps are listed, for example, are you ready to save the planning job.
    - Hosts—The related hosts and their associated configuration details are displayed.
    - Masking Views—The related masking views and their associated configuration details are displayed.
    - Initiators—The related initiators and their associated configuration details are displayed.
    - Port Groups—The related port groups and their associated configuration details are displayed. Click a port group to view additional configuration details. Click Modify to edit a port group.
    - Storage Groups—The related storage groups and their associated configuration details are displayed.
11. Review the Customize page. Optionally click View Provisioning Settings and Details to view detailed information. Click Back if you want to make any changes or click Save Planning Job to go to the next step.
12. The planning dashboard is displayed and shows the details of the saved planning job. You can delete the planning job by hovering over the row and clicking . You can modify the planning job details by selecting the job. If you want to proceed without changing anything, do one of the following:
    - Click Run Now to perform the operation now.
    - Expand Run Now and click Add to Job List to add this task to the job list, from which you can schedule or run the task at your convenience. For more information, see Schedule jobs and Preview jobs.

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