How to do capacity planning for Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub

As an Operator you manage your Azure Stack Hub capacity using quotas on resources. You control Event Hubs resource consumption by setting quotas on the maximum number of cores use by Event Hubs clusters. Event Hubs clusters are created by users when they deploy an Event Hubs resource. There are also various resource consumption requirements for the resource provider, which are covered in this article.

Cluster resource consumption

To understand capacity consumption of Event Hubs deployments, it's important to note that users create Event Hubs clusters based on Capacity Units (CUs). They don't specify a CPU core count when creating an Event Hubs cluster. However, every CU directly maps to a specific number of cores consumed.

Your users will need to create Event Hubs clusters with CUs that meet their business requirements. To inform your decision on quota configuration, the following table shows:

• The total cores used by a 1 CU Event Hubs cluster.
• The approximate capacity required for consumption of other resources, including VM storage, memory, and storage accounts.

	VM Type	Cluster Nodes	Cores per VM/node	Total Cores	VM Storage	Memory	Storage Accounts	Public IPs
1 CU Event Hubs cluster	D11_V2	5	2	10	500 GiB	70 GiB	4	1

All Event Hubs clusters use a D11_V2 VM type for their nodes. A D11_V2 VM type consists of 2 cores. So 1 CU Event Hubs cluster uses 5 D11_V2 VMs, which translates into 10 cores used. In determining the number of cores to configure for a quota, use a multiple of the total cores used by 1 CU. This calculation reflects the maximum CU count you'll allow your users to use, when creating Event Hubs clusters. For example, to configure a quota that allows users to create a cluster with 2 CUs of capacity, set your quota at 20 cores.

Important

For production deployments requiring high availability (HA), we recommend a 2 CU cluster. For non-HA and development/test, you can start with 1 CU.

CU scale-out (smaller-to-larger) is supported via the Create Event Hubs Cluster blade. Scale-in (larger-to-smaller) is not supported.

Resource provider resource consumption

The resource consumption by the Event Hubs resource provider is constant, and independent of the number or sizes of clusters created by users. The following table shows the core utilization by the Event Hubs resource provider on Azure Stack Hub, and the approximate resource consumption by other resources. The Event Hubs resource provider uses a D2_V2 VM type for its deployment.

	VM Type	Cluster Nodes	Cores	VM Storage	Memory	Storage Accounts	Public IPs
Event Hubs resource provider	D2_V2	3	6	300 GiB	21 GiB	2	1

Important

Resource provider consumption is not something that is controlled by quotas. You do not need to accommodate the cores used by the resource provider in your quota configurations. Resource providers are installed using an administrator subscription. The subscription does not impose resource consumption limits on operators, when installing their required resource providers.

Total resource consumption

The total capacity consumed by the Event Hubs service includes resource consumption by the resource provider, and consumption by user-created clusters.

The following table shows the total Event Hubs consumption under various configurations, regardless if they're managed by quota. These numbers are based on the resource provider and Event Hubs cluster consumptions presented above. You can easily calculate your total Azure Stack Hub usage for other deployment sizes, using these examples.

	Cores	VM Storage	Memory	Storage Accounts	Total Storage*	Public IPs**
1-CU cluster + resource provider	16	800 GiB	91 GiB	6	variable	2
2-CU cluster + resource provider	26	1.3 TB	161 GiB	10	variable	2
4-CU cluster + resource provider	46	2.3 TB	301 GiB	18	variable	2

* The ingress data block (message/event) rate and message retention are two important factors that contribute to the storage used by Event Hubs clusters. For example, if message retention is set to 7 days when creating an event hub, and messages are ingested at a rate of 1MB/s, the approximate storage used is 604 GB (1 MB x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours X 7 days). If messages are sent at a rate of 20MB/s with a 7 days retention, the approximate storage consumption is 12TB. Be sure to consider ingress data rate and retention time to fully understand storage capacity consumption.

** Public IP addresses are consumed from the network quota provided as part of your subscription.

Next steps

Complete the Prerequisites for installing Event Hubs on Azure Stack Hub, before beginning the installation process.