Guidelines for deploying BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

The purpose of this topic is to help BMC customers and consultants understand the guidelines for deploying BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management in the infrastructure to support the required use cases, maintain high performance, and remain stable, all at a reasonable cost.

If you do not adhere to these guidelines, deployments cannot be warranted, and can impact BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management functionality as a whole. Additionally, not following the guidelines can lead to errors during upgrades to the latest service pack releases of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

This topic includes:

The topic is intended for BMC customers who work with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and consultants engaged in deployment and sizing exercises or evaluating existing customer infrastructure. BMC assumes that readers of this material are familiar with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and its components.

If you have any questions, contact BMC Customer Support, who can connect you with someone who can review your needs and provide feedback.  

Deployment types

The Install Planner supports the following types of deployments:

• Compact (Only if upgrading to 4.7 or later)
• Small
• Medium

To understand the difference between the deployments, see Component overview and integration. For step-by-step installation procedures for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, see Installing.

Deploying BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

While deploying BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, follow the guidelines outlined below. To correct a deployment that was implemented, but where the guidelines were not followed, you must perform a completely new BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management deployment. BMC is not responsible for supporting or correcting deployments where the guidelines are not followed.

• BMC recommends that you use the components deployed as part of a BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management installation only in context of the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management use case execution.
  Avoid using the components for any other enterprise-level use cases.
  
  
• Execute the Install Planner from a dedicated machine that does not have any BMC components installed on it.
  
  
• Make sure that all BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management machines have 10 GB of space in the temp directory.
  
  
• After a fresh deployment, take a snapshot of the base components.
  
  
• To scale up a deployment or to configure an additional node for HA, use only the Install Planner.
  
  
• In a small or medium BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management deployment, each BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management component must have a dedicated host. Recommendations for performance and sizing are made with this assumption. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is not responsible for improving the performance of the product if this recommendation is not followed. Not following the recommendation will also lead to failures during upgrade.
  
  
• BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management does not support active and active HA from Platform Manager, BMC BladeLogic Network Automation, BMC Atrium Orchestrator components. These components can only be vertically scaled to achieve better performance.
  
  
• BMC recommends that you do not integrate existing components such as BMC BladeLogic Server Automation, BMC BladeLogic Network Automation, BMC Atrium Orchestrator, BMC AR Remedy System to BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management during or after the deployment.
  
  
• The following items are not supported:
  
  
  • Deployment in a mixed operating system environment (such as Linux and Windows combined).
    
    
  • Using the Install Planner to install a high availability (HA) deployment for BMC BladeLogic Network Automation, BMC Atrium Web Service, and BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Platform Manager.
    For the steps to configure these components in HA, see .Installing BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management for an HA installation v4.7. See also Installing the application server on Windows in the BMC Network Automation documentation. Use the Install Planner to deploy BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.
    
    
  • The BMC Remedy AR System component of an ITSM application installation on BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.
    The ITSM application must be used as a third-party application that is deployed on a separate AR System.

Selecting the right deployment

To select the right BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management deployment for your environment, answer the following questions:

• What is your target workload tier: VMware, AWS, Azure, public clouds?
  
  
• How many users do you expect to interact with your cloud?
  
  
• How much execution against instances do you expect if the cloud is managed on the premises?
  
  
• Is the deployment of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management for production, QA, or development?
  
  
• Do you expect your environment to be highly available?
  
  
• What kind of network management are you planning for on-premises physical devices in your data centers?
  
  
• On which operating system do you want to deploy?
  
  
• Do you have the correct hardware as recommended by BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management for the deployments? For more information, see Sizing and scalability factors by environment.
  
  
• Do you have any other use cases that are outside of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management functionality?

Compact deployment

In a compact deployment, all BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components are installed on a single machine. When you select this type of deployment in the Install Planner, you can provide only one host name to deploy all of the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components, but the database can remain separate.

To learn about the maximum load that this deployment can sustain, see Sizing and scalability factors by environment. 

The Install Planner does not support horizontal scaling of a compact deployment. You can vertically scale the deployment above the recommended hardware sizing depending upon the environment-specific resources. High availability (HA) for a compact deployment is also not supported.

Small and medium deployments

In a small or medium deployment, you can install each application on a dedicated instance. Except in a small deployment, BMC Remedy AR System Mid Tier is not installed on a separate machine. You can scale these deployments horizontally, but you must use the Install Planner to do so; however, you should manually configure the load balancer. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management does not support scaling out of the band; otherwise, you might encounter upgrade failures.

The Install Planner enables you to add more nodes (instances) to achieve high availability (HA). To learn how to install a standard HA environment, see .Installing BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management for an HA installation v4.7

Scaling an environment

As mentioned in Small and medium deployments, you can scale a deployment by using the Install Planner. You do not need to scale all the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components if your data is going above the recommended sizing. Look at the data that is growing or will likely grow. Then, depending on what you determine, use the Install Planner to scale only the specific component that needs scaling.

Scaling from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management depends on:

• Concurrent user sessions
• Concurrent workload interaction

For example, if virtual machines in your data center are growing, you should scale only the BMC BladeLogic Server Automation component, since this component needs to handle the load. The other components that control the concurrent sessions do not need to be scaled up.

In another case, where the number of concurrent sessions is a requirement, you can scale BMC Remedy AR System Mid Tier, My Cloud Services console, and BMC Remedy AR System components. BMC BladeLogic Server Automation can remain at the minimum recommended level based on the deployment that you chose during the fresh installation.