Dell Technologies follows a consultative and systematic approach to help IT professionals modernize their infrastructure. The first stage in setting up the new Azure Stack HCI is to start by sizing the new system. To do that we must first collect and analyze the information from the currently running workloads. Dell EMC Live Optics is a free online tool that can gain insights into your environment by collecting configuration and performance data from Microsoft Windows, VMware vCenter, Linux/Unix based servers, and storage. By recording and exploring the current state of IT environments, we can help accelerate informed decisions and reduce the risk of under or overprovisioning the infrastructure.

Note: Live optics collector captures only configuration related data of the customer’s environment and does not include Personal Identifiable Information (PII) data.

To begin with:

• Customers must engage with their Dell Technologies account team to have an account created on the Live Optics portal.
• The next is to download and run the Optical Prime data collector software to capture inventory and performance insights from current hosts and VMs.
• Collectors can run from four hours to seven days, in offline or online mode, to create a local file of the results or stream the data securely to the associated online viewer profile.
• When data collection is complete, Live Optics visualizes the data using various rich reports available in the portal, such as the examples depicted in Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 62.    Demo environment report from live optics portal dashboard

Figure 63.    Demo performance report from live optics portal dashboard