System requirements

This page provides the requirements you must be aware of before installing the product.

Software requirements

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring components are virtual machines designed to run on the following virtualization platform (hypervisor) products only:

  • VMware ESX/ESXi 5.x
  • VMware ESX/ESXi 4.x
  • VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5

Note

For component instances using more than 4 GB of memory, you must use VMware ESX/ESXi 5.x. You can also use VMware ESX/ESXi 4.x, but it must be the Enterprise Plus version. Contact VMware Support for more information.

Software requirements for the Real User Cloud Probe

The Real User Cloud Probe can be installed on a computer running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, Basic Server or Minimal installations.

Hardware requirements

Server hardware and hypervisor must support 64-bit guests.

Each instance of the various BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring components has minimum resource requirements:

Minimum resource requirements per component instance

* An additional 100 GB minimum is recommended for storing traffic data

 

Recommendations
  • While recent hypervisor products are able to manage resource allocation dynamically, it is important not to over-allocate processor and memory resources. It is also important to remember that the hypervisor itself has resource requirements. Therefore, if a given host has 32 GB of memory, for example, and you deploy components which together have requirements approaching 32 GB, you can expect problems.
  • To optimize the performance of a component, you can increase or decrease resource allocations. If performance is unsatisfactory, for example, you can add extra processing power or memory.

Note

Host-hardware and memory latency can limit performance.

Hardware requirements for the Real User Cloud Probe

Each server where the Real User Cloud Probe is installed requires the following minimum hardware:

  • 2 GB RAM
  • 2 CPUs
  • Network information card (NIC) card that supports the ethtool command

Storage requirements

The following components have storage requirements:

  • Real User Analyzer—for saving historical data you can access via the Session Browser (Analyzer). This data is stored "on board" the component. The default disk configuration is 16 GB (only 1 GB for data storage). To accommodate larger volumes of data, you can create a data disk (minimum 100 GB; maximum 570 GB) for each Analyzer instance.
Recommendation

Before installing the Analyzer instance, create the data disk with VMware tools. If you change the size of a pre-existing disk, do so before you switch the power of the virtual machine on.

Warning

You can change processor, memory, and network adapter allocations any time during the life of the component instance. However, for data storage, if you change the disk, data collected to date is deleted.

  • Performance Analytics Engine—for saving historical data you can access via the Performance Analytics Query feature (BMC Application Performance Management Console). This data is stored "off board" on a device such as a network-attached storage (NAS) system. The minimum useful storage allocation is 1 TB per BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring system, and 10 TB is recommended. There is no upper limit.

    Note

    More Performance Analytics Engine instances implies a higher volume of incoming data, so a larger storage allocation might be warranted.

    Supported protocols to serve NAS:

    • CIFS
    • NFS

The management of storage space is based on a rolling-buffer data structure (first in, first out – FIFO). Once a storage disk reaches its maximum capacity, new data overwrites the oldest data.

Network requirements

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring components are network devices interconnected to form a system. In addition, access to the interfaces of these components is achieved via the web. To avoid network-related performance issues, you must take certain configuration and infrastructure details into consideration when planning an installation.

For example, the system works best when you deploy components on the same host. Where a common host is not possible, optimize the communications links between components. Similarly, the connection between Performance Analytics Engine instances and their storage devices must be optimal.

Compatible web browsers

You can access the main user interface of the product using the following combinations of operating systems and web browsers.

Compatible web browsers and operating systems for the Console

* Use the latest version of the browser.

 

Note

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring components Real User Analyzer and Real User Collector, version 1.0 and later, are compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.

To use the BMC Application Performance Management Console with Internet Explorer 7, you must first install an HTML 5-compliant plug-in for Internet Explorer.

 

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