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 (BMC Helix ITOM) 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)
BMC’s performance testing is based on four 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 is not a consideration. 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:
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.
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.
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
Category | CPU | RAM (GB) | Disk (GB) | Number of servers per environment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Compact (not in high | 2 | 4 | 100 | 1 |
Small | 4 | 8 | 300 | 3 |
Medium | 8 | 16 | 500 | 3 |
Large | 8 | 64 | 1,000 | 5 |
Extra large | 8 | 64 | 1,000 | 5 |
For BMC Discovery sizing guidelines, refer to the Sizing and scalability considerations topic in the BMC Discovery documentation.
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 | 3 | 4 | 3,000 |
Small | 3 | 6 | 5,500 |
Medium | 4 | 7 | 9,000 |
Large | 4 | 9 | 42,501 |
Because extra resources have been provisioned for disaster recovery backups you must optimize the storage allocation by updating the value of the MINIO_DR_STORAGE_SIZE parameter.
Based on your deployment size, update the value of the MINIO_DR_STORAGE_SIZE parameter in the helix-on-prem-deployment-manager/configs/<deployment size>.config file. The recommended values are:
- Compact - 750Gi
- Small - 1375Gi
- Medium - 2250Gi
- Large - 10625Gi
For example, if the size of your deployment is small, set the value of the MINIO_DR_STORAGE_SIZE parameter as 1375Gi in the helix-on-prem-deployment-manager/configs/small.config file.
MINIO_DR_STORAGE_SIZE = 1375Gi
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 | 2,200 | 13,000 | 4 | 17 |
Small | 3,000 | 17,000 | 6 | 33 |
Medium | 4,000 | 25,000 | 7 | 37 |
Large | 4,000 | 25,000 | 9 | 50 |
RPO and RTO measurements
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the time-based measurement of tolerated data loss. Recovery Time Objecting (RTO) is the targeted duration between an event failure and the point where the operations resume.
The following table lists the RPO and RTO measurements:
Deployment size | Recovery Point Objective (RPO) | Recovery Time Objecting (RTO) | Loss in productivity | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
For all components | Without Log Analytics | For all components | Without Log Analytics | ||
Small | 24 hours | 24 hours | 1 hour 30 minutes | 2 hours 30 minutes | 2 hours 30 minutes |
Medium | 24 hours | 24 hours | 1 hour 45 minutes | 4 hours 45 minutes | 3 hours 45 minutes |
Sizing guidelines to upgrade BMC Helix ITOM
When you upgrade to BMC Helix ITOM version 24.1, consider the following additional resource requirements:
Sizing considerations for migrating from Open Distro to OpenSearch
You must run the Open Distro to OpenSearch migration utility to migrate the Elastic search data from Open Distro to OpenSearch. For the migration to be successful, in addition to the resources listed in this topic, the following processor, memory, and disk space are required:
Category | CPU (Core) | RAM (GB) | PVC (GB) |
|---|---|---|---|
Compact | 15 | 52 | 50 |
Small | 27 | 64 | 100 |
Medium | 36 | 82 | 300 |
Large | 74 | 148 | 600 |
Extra Large | 138 | 280 | 900 |
You can reclaim the resources after the upgrade.