Considerations for deploying Infrastructure Management on a VM

TrueSight Infrastructure Management can be installed and run on a VMware virtual machine (VM).

When deploying the product on VMs, be aware that additional overhead exists because resources are shared across VMs. The same performance that is possible running applications on a physical computer is not possible on VMs. However, VMs offer more flexibility and ease of administration for some aspects, such as high availability and backups. 

Consider the following VMware best practices:

  • If the VM resources are available and not over-allocated, you do not need to reserve the CPU and memory. When troubleshooting performance issues, BMC may ask you to temporarily reserve the resources to help isolate the issue.
  • If PATROL Agents in your environment are configured to connect with more than one Integration Service node in the cluster (with an active/active configuration), it is recommended to exclude the Integration Service node(s) from VMware HA. 
  • You must use the Thick Provision Eager Zeroed disk type for the TrueSight Infrastructure Management server. The Thick Provision Eager Zeroed disk provides the advantages of clustering features such as fault tolerance.
  • Use only two to three virtual machine snapshots in a chain. BMC recommends that you avoid using the single snapshot for more than 72 hours. You can either delete the snapshot or consolidate it. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009402.
  • Enable NIC teaming.
  • Use a VMware paravirtual NIC adapter for optimized performance.
  • ESX overprovision:
    • Memory overcommitment - Allocating more memory to the VMs than the physical host. When the combined working memory footprint of all the VMs exceeds that of host memory size, it indicates Memory overcommitment. Avoid Memory overcommitment.
    • CPU overcommitment - Running more vCPUs on the host compared to the total number of physical processor cores on a specific host. Avoid CPU overcommitment.
  • Memory ballooning - When the demand of the VM is high for the host to handle and the host is running out of the physical memory, Memory ballooning occurs. If the Memory ballooning occurs continuously for a longer time, it might effect negatively the overall VM performance and  TrueSight Operations Management application.
  • Datastore -  Monitor the datastore section of the VM where the application is installed. There should be enough free space on the VM.
  • Configure Jumbo frames for the storage adapter.
  • Periodically monitor the CPU usage of the host.

See BMC Software’s common support policy across all BMC products for virtualized platforms support at http://www.bmc.com/support/policy-for-virtualized-platforms.html.

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