System requirements for BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring system components

This topic lists hardware and software requirements for virtual machine-based components and for other components that must be met before installing the product. The following topics are presented:

Platform requirements for virtual machines

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

Supported virtual machine platforms and operating systems

Virtual platform	Operating system	Notes
Citrix Xen	XenServer 6.0.2	None
Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM)	Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.3 (Santiago)	None
Microsoft Hyper-V	Windows Server 2012 R2 Windows Server 2008 R2	None
VMware	ESX/ESXi 5.x ESX/ESXi 4.x ESX/ESXi 3.5	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. For more information, contact VMware Support. OVF 1.0 files are supported by VMware vSphere 4 (and later) products, VMware vCenter 4 (and later), and VMware ESX/ESXi 4 (and later). For backward compatibility with earlier versions of vCenter and ESX, you must use a conversion tool, such as VMware vCenter Converter 4.0. (VMware discontinued support for the OVF format in vCenter Converter 4.3.) For more information, see the VMware website. For instructions on how to convert the description file, see Installing-a-component-from-an-OVF-file.

Hardware requirements for virtual machines

Server hardware and hypervisors must support 64-bit guests. Each instance of the various BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring components has the following minimum resource requirements:

Minimum resource requirements per component instance

Component	Processor	Memory	Disk	Number of network interfaces
BMC Application Management Console	1 vCPU	4 GB	20 GB	1
Real User Analyzer	2 vCPU	8 GB	16 GB¹	1
Real User Collector	1 vCPU	8 GB	28 GB	2
Real User Monitor	2 vCPU	8 GB	16 GB¹	2
Performance Analytics Engine	2 vCPU	4 GB	10 GB	1
Aggregation Server for Extended Reporting	2 vCPU	5 GB	30 GB	1
Data Warehouse for Extended Reporting	4 vCPU	10 GB	300—500 GB	1
APM Central	4 vCPU	12 GB	28 GB¹	2

^{1 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 overallocate 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.

For additional hardware requirements based on traffic volume, see Sizing-considerations.

System requirements for Extended Reporting

The following systems are required to implement Extended Reporting.

Oracle database

The BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring Extended Reporting component requires a database instance to serve as the data warehouse. Following are the requirements for the database system.

Database:
- Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition running on Linux (Oracle partitioning is required.)
- Oracle datafiles stored in an operation file system file system (not ASM)
Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, Basic Server or Minimal installations
- This operating system must use UTC time.
- The operating system must include the ability to run system commands (for example: /bin/dd. /bin/rm, /bin/mv).
Hardware: The database system requires the following minimum hardware:
- 10 GB RAM
- 4 CPUs
- 300—500 GB storage

Note

Oracle online backups are not supported because of the use of NOLOGGING clauses in load operations.

SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise

The BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring Extended Reporting component requires the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform version 4.0.

Operating system: Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008, 64-bit versions only.
Hardware: The following minimum hardware is recommended:
- 8 GB RAM
- 4 CPUs
- 80 GB storage

You should validate the system requirements in the documentation for the SAP product through the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 SP05+ Supported Platforms (PAM). You can register for documentation access on that site.

Storage requirements

Consult the following table for components that have storage requirements:

Component storage requirements and recommendations

Component	Storage purpose	Requirement
Real User Analyzer or Real User Monitor	Used for saving historical traffic data you can access via the Session Browser (Analyzer). This data is stored "on board" the component.	Recommendation: BMC recommends that you create an additonal local disk (minimum 100 GB; maximum 570 GB) for each Analyzer or Monitor component instance. If you allocated a 570 GB local disk, 400 GBs will be allocated to the database. Before you install the component instance, create the local disk with VM management tools. For additional information, see Sizing-Analyzer-or-Monitor-instances. Note: The default, built-in disk configuration is 16 GB (with only 1 GB for data storage), which is adequate for a proof-of-concept deployment. Warning: You can change processor and memory 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	Used for saving historical traffic data you can access via the Performance Analytics Query feature (BMC Application 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 100 GB per data provider. There is no maximum size restriction. For additional information, see Sizing-Performance-Analytics-Engine-instances. You can use either NAS (Network Attached Storage) device or you can connect a local disk. The following options are supported for a NAS device: Server Message Block/Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS) Network File System (NFS)
APM Central	Used for saving historical traffic data for both the Real User Monitor and the PAE installed with APM Central.	Recommendation: BMC recommends that you create an additional local disk with a minimum of 100 GB. There is no maximum size restriction. The local disk is split equally for the Monitor (Session Browser) and PAE data; however, any space over 970 GB will be allocated to PAE only (no additional storage is given to the Monitor). Before you install the component instance, create the local disk with VM management tools. For additional information, see Sizing-APM-Central-instances. Note: The default, built-in disk configuration is adequate for a proof-of-concept deployment only. Warning: You can change processor and memory 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.
Aggregation Server for Extended Reporting	Used to temporarily store extracted data from an Analyzer and for transforming data into multidimensional data models (performance cubes). This data is not permanently stored on the NAS device.	The minimum storage allocation is 30 GB. The Server Message Block/Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS) protocol is supported for the NAS device.

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.

For more information about network requirements and the required ports, see the following topics:

For BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring Extended Reporting, the Aggregation Server and SAP BusinessObjects require access to the Oracle database default listener port (TCP 1521).

vmxnet2 network adapter is not supported by the system.

Supported LDAP servers

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Active Directory
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory
OpenLDAP (slapd)

Compatible web browsers

You can access the user interfaces by using the following combinations of operating systems and web browsers.

Compatible web browsers and operating systems for the ConsoleThe [confluence_table-plus] macro is a standalone macro and it cannot be used inline. Click on this message for details.
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Recommendation

To access the documentation portal, BMC recommends that you use the Mozilla Firefox browser.