Sizing and scalability consideration

This section contains information to help you size your BMC IT Business Management Suite environment. The information is at the server level. If your deployment use case involves more than one server, this information applies separately to each server.

BMC Remedy Action Request (AR) System

The hardware system requirements for AR System are as follows:

• A VM slice running on 64-bit Windows 2008 R2.

• 4 vCPU or 4 physical CPU cores (For example, CPUs based on Intel™'s Xeon® E7330 @ 2.4 GHz processors) 

  Warning

  Note

  BMC recommends that BMC Remedy AR System is the only component that runs on a VM slice. The performance and scalability of the server is not impacted significantly. Both Database Server and JBoss(application server) should run on more powerful physical systems.

• Memory: ≥ 8 GB.
• Total amount of disk space: ≥ 40 GB.
• Network: Standard Gb LAN.

Database server

The hardware system requirements for the database server are higher compared to the AR System, but less demanding relative to the JBoss. In general, the hardware requirements for database server are as follows:

• A physical server running on 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database Server. Due to performance and scalability requirements, BMC does not recommend installing the database server on a VM slice.
• 8 physical CPU cores (For example, CPUs based on Intel™'s Xeon® E7330 @ 2.4 GHz processors or Intel™'s Xeon® E5320 @ 1.86 GHz processors)
• Memory: ≥ 16 GB.
• Total amount of disk space for the server: ≥ 40 GB.
• Storage for data: ≥ 40 GB on RAID 0 or RAID 10.
• Network: Standard Gb LAN.

JBoss server

The JBoss server resource consumption is higher compared to BMC Remedy AR System and database server. BMC recommends a system that is based on the latest Intel™ processor. BMC recommends the following specifications for a JBoss server:

• A physical server that is based on Intel™'s Xeon® E5620 @ 2.4 GHz processors or newer processors. According to the tests conducted at BMC, Intel E5620 processors (released in the years 2010-2012) are much faster than E5320 and E7330 (released much earlier). Due to performance and scalability requirements, BMC does not recommend running JBoss on a VM slice.
   Table 1 below provides a comparison of the different hardware configurations when used as the JBoss server with the same workload intensity.
• Operating system: 64-bit Windows 2008 R2.

• 8 - 16 physical Xeon E5620 or newer and faster CPU cores, depending on the # of ITBM concurrent users. In general, if you need to support 500 or more BMC IT Business Management Suite concurrent users, you can use 16 Xeon E5620 or newer and faster CPUs. For 250 or fewer BMC IT Business management Suite concurrent users, you can use 8 cores. 

  Warning

  Note

  BMC IT Business Management Suite does not support horizontal scaling of JBoss via clustering and load balancing. Therefore to scale BMC IT Business Management Suite to the required performance, you must use servers with newer and faster CPUs.

• Memory: ≥ 16 GB.
• Total amount of disk space for the server: ≥ 40 GB.
• Network: Standard Gb LAN.

BMC used the following test conditions to compare hardware configurations for JBoss server:

• Workload: DRM with 300 concurrent users.
• JBoss server:
  • JVM: 64-bit with 2 GB for heap size and 512 MB for max perm size
  • OS: 64-bit Windows 2008 R2
• AR System and Database: same for all runs.
• Differentiating Factor (one variable – the hardware used for JBoss):
  • Intel Xeon E7330 @ 2.4 GHz (Run # 1): a VM slice with 8 vCPU/8 GB RAM.
  • Intel Xeon E5320 @ 1.86 GHz (Run #2): a physical system with 8 cores/16 GB RAM (2x4 physical cores with no hyper-threading (HT)).
  • Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.4 GHz (Run #3): a physical system with 8 cores/32 GB RAM (2x4 physical cores with hyper-threading).
  • Intel Xeon X5650 @ 2.67 GHz (Run #4): a physical system with 12 cores/32 GB RAM(2x6 physical cores with hyper-threading).

The following table shows comparison of the average response time of the different hardware configurations used as the JBoss server with the same workload intensity.

CPU model	E7330 @2.4 GHz	E5320 @1.86 GHz	E5620 @2.4 GHz	X5650 @2.67 GHz
action/# of CPUs	8vCPU	8 cores w/o HT	8 cores with HT	12 cores with HT
login	78.66	3.22	1.778	1.781
new_project_save	31.916	7.107	2.403	3.421
task_template_load	28.476	7.157	2.296	0.434
search_project	22.011	4.388	1.725	1.575
newline_item_save	29.773	5.635	2.131	0.848
attachment_save	30.429	4.731	1.844	1.305
new_task_save	123.062	20.867	4.101	2.479
load_task	10.818	6.739	1.907	1.132
view_task	6.663	4.324	1.247	0.791
new_portfolio_save	19.709	6.477	2.498	2.626
personalize_page_save	7.444	12.024	4.397	3.942
search_portfolio	3.211	4.809	0.932	0.52
value_analysis	6.173	10.789	8.957	3.166
project_statistics	3.523	6.452	2.769	2.946
average	28.70	7.48	2.788	1.93
ratio (base: 8vCPU)	1	4	10	15
ratio (base: 8 CPU)		1	3	4
ratio (base: 16 CPU)			1	1.4

From the data in the table above, BMC used the average response time to derive the relative power of physical versus virtual and newer versus older CPU models. BMC used the following metric:

• The two physical server configurations resulted in 4 and 10 times better performance than the VM slice configuration.
• Newer Xeon E5620 resulted in 3 times better performance than the older Xeon E5320.
• Latest Xeon X5650 resulted in 1.4 times better performance than the Xeon E5620.