Determining the number of PATROL Agents required to monitor VMware vCenter Server

This section explains the recommendations to determine the number of BMC PATROL Agents required to monitor a large VMware vCenter Server. The recommendations are based on the in-house testing performed by BMC.

Run the custom utility to determine the number of instances and parameters of VMware vCenter Server:

1. Unzip the utility and copy the vcenter.jar file in the $PATROL_HOME/vsm/bin directory.
2. Open command prompt or terminal and change the directory to $PATROL_HOME/vsm/bin.
3. Run the following command:
   java –cp .\* Count <vCenter> <port> <user> <password>

Replace vCenter, port, user, and password with your environment data.

The output of this utility provides you an overview of your environment with details like number of datacenters, hosts, virtual machines, and so on. Based on this information, the approximate number of instances possible in your environment is calculated. A PATROL Agent with TrueSight console can monitor up to 45,000 instances (175,000 parameters) of VMware vSphere Server. You can use this information and the utility output to calculate the number of PATROL Agents required in your environment.

The utility output also provides the breakup of instances based on datacenter and clusters. You can use this information to filter instances on multiple PATROL Agents.