Hardware requirements

The following sections provide a quick overview of the minimum hardware requirements for the different components of BMC Client Management. For more detailed information and specific database recommendations refer to Database tuning.

Hardware requirements for the master, database, and relays

This table lists the recommended hardware per node count. It is important to understand that this document generalizes the hardware recommendations and the hardware requirements can be more or less for any given environment. When running in virtual environments, CPU, RAM, and NIC utilization on the host system can impact performance. Dedicated physical CPU, RAM, and NIC cards can improve performance.

These estimations are for infrastructures in which a Windows relay has a maximum of 2000 child nodes or a Linux relay has 5000 child nodes.

Hardware sizing recommendations

The following table lists sizing recommendations for the dedicated hardware resources required by the server database, depending on the number of nodes.

Number of nodes	Memory	CPU/Core/Speed/Cache	Estimated database size
20,000	16 GB	2/4/2 GHz/8.0 MB	20 GB
50,000	24 GB	2/4/3 GHz/12 MB	50 GB
100,000	48 GB	2/8/3 GHz/20 MB	100 GB
150,000	72 GB	2/8/3 GHz/20 MB	150 GB
200,000	96 GB	2/8/3 GHz/20 MB	200 GB

Evaluation or <500 nodes

	Master server	Each relay ^2,3	Dedicated database ⁴
CPU	1	Dedicated relay should not be required ¹	Dedicated database should not be required
Core	2
Speed	2 GHz
Cache	2 MB
RAM	4 GB
Estimated size	50 Gb

<20,000 nodes

	Master server	Each relay ^2,3	Dedicated database ⁴
CPU	1	1	2
Core	4	4	4
Speed	2 GHz	2 GHz	2 GHz
Cache	8 MB	8 MB	8 MB
RAM	8 GB	8 GB	16 GB
Disk size for Client Management data storage	200 GB free space, 15k RPM or faster drives ⁵	200 GB ⁵	20 GB ⁶

<50,000 nodes

	Master server	Each relay ^2,3	Dedicated database ⁴
CPU	1	1	2
Core	4	4	4
Speed	2 GHz	2 GHz	3 GHz
Cache	8 MB	8 MB	12 MB
RAM	16 GB	8 GB	24 GB
Disk size for Client Management data storage	200 GB free space, 15k RPM or faster drives ⁵	200 GB ⁵	50 GB ⁶

<100,000 nodes

	Master server	Each relay ^2,3	Dedicated database ⁴
CPU	1	1	2
Core	4	4	8
Speed	2 GHz	2 GHz	3 GHz
Cache	8 MB	8 MB	20 MB
RAM	16 GB	8 GB	48 GB
Disk size for Client Management data storage	200 GB free space, 15k RPM or faster drives ⁵	200 GB ⁵	100 GB ⁶

<150,000 nodes

	Master server	Each relay ^2,3	Dedicated database ⁴
CPU	1	1	2
Core	4	4	8
Speed	2 GHz	2 GHz	3 GHz
Cache	8 MB	8 MB	20 MB
RAM	16 GB	8 GB	72 GB
Disk size for Client Management data storage	200 GB free space, 15k RPM or faster drives ⁵	200 GB ⁵	150 GB ^6,7

<200,000 nodes

	Master server	Each relay ^2,3	Dedicated database ⁴
CPU	1	1	2
Core	4	4	8
Speed	2 GHz	2 GHz	3 GHz
Cache	8 MB	8 MB	20 MB
RAM	16 GB	8 GB	96 GB
Disk size for Client Management data storage	200 GB free space, 15k RPM or faster drives ⁵	200 GB ⁵	200 GB ^6,7

Required disk space varies based on size of deployed packages, patches and service packs.
Number of relays required varies based upon network topology and other environmental factors.
These estimations are for infrastructures in which a Windows relay has a maximum of 2000 child nodes or a Linux relay has 5000 child nodes.
Check with the database vendor to identify any hardware limitations based upon the version in use. Your licensed database version cannot utilize all hardware resources, for example, Microsoft SQL Express, Microsoft SQL Workgroup, Oracle Express.
The size of the disk space depends on the BMC Client Management features you are using. For example, if you are using Patch Management (including several Windows 10 versions and languages) or big software distribution or your relay is configured as OSD Image Repository (several images of 8 GB each), you might need more disk space.
This is the estimated disk size for storing only Client Management generated data. For detailed information on the required database size and best practices see Database tuning.
BMC recommends and Oracle or PostgreSQL database on Linux for better performance, but an SQL Server database is also possible to use SQL Server.

Hardware requirements for the console

Computers on which the console is to be launched require at least 2 GB RAM.

Supported virtualization

Component

Supported Platforms ¹

Virtual Platform Support

BMC Client Management (Client Management ) was proven by BMC Software customers to function properly in virtualized data centers that use VMware® ESXi™, VMware® Infrastructure™ and Microsoft Hyper-V Core Server 2008 R2. Client Management is only supported in these environments if the product is installed on an approved OS platform, web server, and database. Client Management might work properly on other virtualization products, but BMC Software has not tested them and verified that functionality. BMC Software has no documented statistics regarding the performance of Client Management in these environments since the mix of outside vendors' applications and hardware can have a direct impact on overall performance.Additionally, should BMC Software believe that the virtualization layer is the root cause of an incident the customer is required to contact the appropriate virtualization layer support provider to resolve the virtualization issue. Note, that BMC server components are not supported on VMware Server™ or VMware Workstation using the GSX engine in a production environment since it is not designed for hardware optimization.

The OSD Manager (functional agent module/role) is not supported on a virtual platform. It must be designated/reside on a physical host due to TFTP constraints with virtualization. This also applies to the Network Boot Listener and the Image Repository.