Infrastructure Management Data Collection Host

The Cloud deployment requires a subset of the information that can be collected by the VSM KM. This is captured using the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management profile setting of the collection mode parameter of the VSM KM. This is automatically set by the Data Collection Host installer independent of whether it is invoked using the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Installation Planner or manually.

Recommendations for using the Data Collection Host

This section describes some best practices and recommendations that you must follow while using the Data Collection Host.

Load balancing data collection

For a large amount of virtual machines (VMs) hosted by a vCenter using the enterprise configuration of the VMware vSphere KM, load balancing data collection across several BMC PATROL Agents and VMware vSphere KM combinations might be beneficial in improving performance.

The Virtual Servers KM version 3.0 supports two out-of-the-box configurations:

• BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management configuration collecting limited metrics (default)
• Enterprise configuration collecting all available metrics

The enterprise configuration consumes more resources on the Data Collection Host.

To load balance the data collection, multiple instances of the BMC PATROL Agent or KM can be created on one Data Collection Host using the Data Collection Host installer. After the installation, each instance needs to be configured manually to monitor the appropriate number of VMs using the ESX clusters within a vCenter as separator.

The tangible benefit of load balancing the data collection is improved performance of data collection when using the VMware vSphere KM with a large number of VMs.

Enabling data collection for all attributes of the VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer KMs on a Data Collection Host

If you enable data collection for all attributes of the VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer KMs on a Data Collection Host, then you can view all the metrics provided by these KMs in Infrastructure Management. You need the appropriate license before applying this modification.

Enabling data collection is a manual post installation step to provision the Data Collection Host with either the Data Collection Host installer or a BMC Server Automation Cloud Lifecycle Management package directly from the BMC Server Automation Console. For the VMware vSphere KM, this enables the enterprise profile.

The tangible benefit of enabling data collection for all attributes is that you can view all the metrics provided by the VMware vSphere KM and the Citrix XenServer KM in the operator console.