Sizing and scalability considerations


The sizing baselines specified are based on the performance lab benchmark test results performed in BMC’s test labs. You can use these baselines for your on-premises BMC Helix IT Operations Management deployment. 

The following applications were tested in the BMC test labs for BMC Helix IT Operations Management sizing considerations:

  • BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
  • BMC Helix Dashboards
  • BMC Helix Intelligent Automation
  • BMC Helix Developer Tools
  • BMC Helix Log Analytics
  • BMC Helix Operations Management
  • BMC Helix Portal
  • BMC Helix Service Monitoring (BMC Helix AIOps)


Important

  • If you use a combination of some products such as BMC Helix Operations Management, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, and BMC Helix IT Service Management in your environment, contact BMC Support for the sizing guidelines.

  • If you are deploying BMC Helix Operations Management in a multitenant environment, contact BMC Support for specific sizing guidelines.

BMC’s performance testing is based on five different system usage profiles: compact, small, medium, and large.
The compact is a special sizing that is the minimum requirement for a functional BMC Helix Platform system. Compact systems are recommended only for POC systems, where resilience and system performance under load are not considered. All compact systems cited on this page are non-high-availability deployments for BMC Helix Operations Management and the BMC Discovery. We recommend the compact sizing for a POC because it is a single-replica deployment.

If your usage exceeds the maximum numbers for the large sizing, contact BMC Support for guidance on how to size your infrastructure.

Kubernetes infrastructure sizing requirements

Compute requirements are the combined requirements of CPU, RAM, and Persistent Volume Disk requirements for the Kubernetes worker nodes.  

These compute requirements are shared between all the worker nodes in your Kubernetes cluster. The worker nodes in your Kubernetes cluster must have CPU and RAM that matches or exceeds the total infrastructure sizing requirement plus the per worker node logging requirement. This is required to support the anticipated load for the benchmark sizing category for a BMC Helix IT Operations Management deployment. 


Considerations when building a Kubernetes cluster

There are several considerations when building a Kubernetes cluster regarding sizing before considering the application requirements. The application requirements are meant to be included in addition to your other resource requirements. This could include but not be limited to:

  • Kubernetes control plane nodes
  • Kubernetes management software requirements
  • Host operating system requirements
  • Additional software (for example: monitoring software) that is deployed on the cluster

It is important to refer to your distributors and vendors to make sure additional requirements are also included in any cluster planning.

Kubernetes cluster requirements

The application must have specific hardware resources made available to it for successful deployment and operation. Any competing workloads (such as your Kubernetes management or monitoring software) on the cluster and host operating system requirements must be considered in addition to the BMC Helix IT Operations Management suite requirements when building your Kubernetes cluster.

The following table represents the minimum amount of computing resources that must be made available by the Kubernetes cluster to the BMC Helix IT Operations Management deployment:

Important

The total sizing does not include the requirements for BMC Discovery.

Kubernetes quotas

Quotas may be set up on the cluster namespaces to enforce maximum scheduled requests and limits. Any attempt to schedule additional workloads beyond configured quotas will result in Kubernetes preventing the scheduling which may complicate successful software operations in the namespace. The following table shows the recommended settings to allow a BMC Helix IT Operations Management suite deployment:

Kubernetes node requirements

Your cluster must maintain a minimum number of worker nodes to provide an HA-capable environment for the application data lakes.

To support the loss of worker nodes in your cluster you must provide extra worker nodes with resources equal to your largest worker node. This way, if a worker node goes down you will maintain the minimum number of resources required in the cluster to recover the application.
For example: If you have 4 nodes of 10 vCPU and 50GB RAM, you will need a 5th node of 10 vCPU and 50GB RAM to not have recovery impacted by the loss of one worker node.

Important

The total amount of vCPU and RAM resources selected for the worker nodes must match or exceed the required vCPU and RAM specified in the Kubernetes cluster sizing requirements.


Worker node disk requirements

Kubernetes worker nodes require the following free disk space allocation for container images:

Requirement

Value

Worker node system disk

At least 100 GB

Persistent volume requirements

The high performance of Kubernetes Persistent Volume Disk is essential for the overall system performance. BMC supports a Bring-Your-Own-Storage class for Kubernetes persistent volumes.

Important

Your storage class for the Kubernetes persistent volumes must support volume expansion and dynamic provisioning.

The following tables show the disk requirements in GB:

We recommend that you use solid-state drive (SSD) with the following specifications: 

RWM throughput and IOPS requirements: 

Sizing guidelines for the BMC Discovery

Disaster recovery requirement

If you enable disaster recovery, you will need additional processor, memory, and disk space to operate successfully. The following guidance is based on using the default disaster recovery configurations. Any modification to these settings might impact the amount of disk storage that is necessary and must be recalculated.  
The following tables list the additional resources required in the Kubernetes cluster (per data center): 

Category 

CPU (Core) 

RAM (GB) 

PVC (GB) 

Compact 

11 

2,080

Small 

17 

4,799 

Medium 

12 

34

6,920

Large 

13 

61 

34,501

The following tables list the additional recommendations to add to the namespace quotas (per data center): 

BMC Helix IT Operations Management Namespace Quotas (DR Additions) 

Category 

CPU Requests (Millicore) 

CPU Limits (Millicore) 

MEM Requests (GB) 

MEM Limits (GB) 

Compact 

5,000 

13,000

11 

27 

Small 

9,000 

25,000 

17 

51 

Medium 

12,000 

29,000 

34 

78

Large 

13,000 

27,000 

61 

99 


 

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