VMware Support Guidelines

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2 NOTICE The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement. The software may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the agreement. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, for any purpose without the express written permission of Advent Software, Inc. Information in this document may be revised from time to time without notice. This document, which is provided solely to Licensees of Advent Software, Inc., is confidential and proprietary. U.S. Government Users: Use, duplication, or disclosure is subject to the restrictions as set forth in the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS subparagraph (c)(1)(ii), or the Commercial Computer Software -- Restricted Rights at CFR , subparagraphs (c)(1) and (2), as applicable. Manufacturer is Advent Software, Inc. 600 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA Copyright 2009 by Advent Software, Inc. All rights reserved. NOTE: All names of individuals that may appear in any displays herein are fictitious. Any similarity to the names of any persons living or dead is unintentional and strictly coincidental. Part number: VMW10a Publication date: October 2009 Advent, the Advent logo, Advent Browser Reporting, Advent Corporate Actions, Advent INX, Advent Office, Advent Packager, Advent Partner, Advent Portfolio Exchange, Advent Revenue Center, Advent Rules Manager, Advent Software, Inc., Advent TrustedNetwork, Advent Warehouse, Axys, Geneva, Moxy, MyAdvent, Portfolio Exchange, Qube, Rex, SmartClick, and WealthLine are registered trademarks of Advent Software, Inc. Advent Report Center, AdvisorMart, and DataExchange are trademarks of Advent Software, Inc. Other trademarks are those of their respective holders, and should be treated as such. Printed on Recycled Paper.

3 1 SUPPORT GUIDELINES OVERVIEW SUPPORTED PLATFORMS Advent Products VMware Products SUMMARY OF SUPPORT GUIDELINES ESX HOST HARDWARE CPU AND MEMORY Allocating Virtual CPUs CPU and Memory Resource Management NETWORK STORAGE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS APPENDIX How Resource Management Works... 7 Advent Software, Inc. i February 23, :20 AM

4 1 Support Guidelines Overview This document discusses the support guidelines for running Advent products in production on environments running VMware. These guidelines are designed to ensure that Advent applications receive adequate resources from the VMware hypervisor to complete processing necessary over the course of the day in a reasonable time frame. Resource Management is an intricate facet of VMware ESX and is highly configurable. Although flexibility can be a benefit, improper configurations can also be a source of performance degradation. Due to the critical nature of Advent applications, the goal of the support guidelines is to provide a high-level of system stability, uptime, and acceptable performance for end-users. Advent products on supported VMware ESX platforms have functional equivalence compared to when running on physical servers. These guidelines state what Advent can reliably support with high confidence. As such, our support guidelines require best-practice levels of resource allocation that maximize application reliability. The guidelines do not attempt to define the minimum requirements for Advent applications to run successfully. While some clients may find they can run successfully on fewer resources that may save costs, the risk of application stability in those environments is higher than Advent can reliably support. These guidelines supplement the Advent system requirements for each supported Advent product, as well as the VMware ESX hardware requirements and best practices. If VMware hardware requirements call for more hardware than either these guidelines or an Advent application s system requirements, or vice versa, you should use the specifications that are the greater of the two to be within support of both Advent Software and VMware system requirements. Please consult the VMware Performance Tuning Best Practices documentation for VMware s best practices for performance tuning at and Advent system requirements on Advent Connection at 2 Supported Platforms This section lists the Advent products that are covered by the support guidelines in this document. All other Advent products are out of the scope of this document. 2.1 Advent Products Currently Supported: Advent Portfolio Exchange 2.0, Update 3, and above Tamale RMS 4.5, and above Geneva 8.0, and above (Geneva Application Server on Windows, only) Coming Soon: Advent Moxy Advent Revenue Center Advent Rules Manager No Current Plans to Support: Advent Software, Inc. 1 February 23, :20 AM

5 Geneva UNIX Server 2.2 VMware Products VMware ESX Summary of Support Guidelines This section contains a summary of the Advent VMware support guidelines. For more details, see the corresponding section for each component. Component Requirements Recommendations ESX Host Hardware For details, see Section 4 on page 2. Physical host resources must be equal to or greater than the sum of the system requirements for all Advent applications residing on an ESX host Account for virtualization overhead according to VMware recommendations. CPU and Memory For details, see Section 5 on page 3. Set Reservations on Advent virtual machines according to the system requirements for each server Set Limits on non-advent virtual machines Start with small number of vcpus and increase if necessary Use Resource Pools for easier management of resources Set Shares on Advent virtual machines or Resource Pools Network For details, see Section 6 on page 4. Storage For details, see Section 7 on page 4. N/A N/A Use multiple NICs on the virtual switch connected to Advent virtual machines Use separate virtual switches to segregate virtual machines that have heavy network loads Keep virtual machines for like applications on the same host Use enterprise-class network storage for best performance Use separate storage arrays (LUNs) for each I/O-intensive virtual machine 4 ESX Host Hardware For each Advent product, Advent requires the ESX servers which are hosting the virtual machines running Advent applications to have physical hardware equal to or greater than the system requirements posted on Advent Connection, or otherwise prescribed by Advent. In addition, due to the nature of virtualization, Advent recommends that you account for additional overhead resulting from the allocation of resources by the VMware hypervisor to the hosted virtual machines. The amount of overhead varies depending on the number of virtual machines running on the ESX host, the application running on the virtual machine, and various other factors. To determine the appropriate amount of additional hardware resources to account for this overhead, refer to the VMware documentation relevant to the version of ESX you are running. Advent Software, Inc. 2 February 23, :20 AM

6 5 CPU and Memory 5.1 Allocating Virtual CPUs When deciding the number of virtual CPUs (vcpus) to allocate to a virtual machine running an Advent application, first consult the system requirements for the application on Advent Connection, or the specifications prescribed by your Advent Sales representative. These specifications should serve as a guideline. However, allocating too many vcpus to a virtual machine may degrade system performance due to CPU Ready Time. When multiple processes are trying to use the same physical CPU, that CPU may not be immediately available and a process must wait before ESX Server can allocate a CPU to it. The ESX Server scheduler manages access to the physical CPUs on the host system. The time a virtual machine or other process waits in the queue in a ready-to-run state before it can be scheduled on a CPU is known as ready time. (VMware ESX Server 3 Ready Time Observations, Since the number of vcpus in a virtual machine is one of several factors that may contribute to an increase in ready time, allocating the proper amount of vcpus to a virtual machine is important. If there aren t enough physical CPUs available, the virtual machine will wait until all vcpus can be scheduled before doing work. This can have a direct effect on user response times. As a general rule of thumb, you should test your virtual machines under simulated load to observe performance and allocate more vcpus only if you observe poor performance. Otherwise, you may see increased Ready Time, and as a result, increased user response times. 5.2 CPU and Memory Resource Management In order to guarantee CPU and memory resources to Advent applications when they are needed, Advent requires that you set Reservations on Advent virtual machines according to the system requirements for the application. In addition, Advent requires that you set Limits on non-advent virtual machines that reside on the same physical host to constrain the resources so they do not exceed a certain maximum amount of CPU and memory resources. The non-advent virtual machines must be configured such that the remaining CPU and memory resources available to the Advent virtual machines on the ESX host are at least the amount required by Advent s system requirements. Keep in mind that the remaining CPU and memory resources may also be used by internal VMware processes, so you should account for the additional overhead appropriately. In addition, Advent recommends that you use the Shares property for CPU and memory to increase priority of the Advent virtual machines. This will ensure that Advent virtual machines have higher priority on CPU and memory resources when there is a contention for these resources. For details about overhead, refer to the Resource Management Guide published by VMware ( For details about how much memory overhead can occur, refer to the section titled Understanding Memory Overhead. Advent Software, Inc. 3 February 23, :20 AM

7 6 Network The network bandwidth required by each application varies based on company-specific application workloads. You should provide adequate network resources for the applications running on each ESX host, based on your usage. Advent recommends that the virtual switches connected to the virtual machines running Advent applications contain multiple NICs for better performance and redundancy. If there are non- Advent virtual machines in your ESX server or cluster that have heavy network loads, Advent recommends using separate virtual switches to minimize the impact to the Advent virtual machines. For better performance, Advent recommends that virtual machines for multi-server Advent applications be hosted on the same ESX host as long as the hosts are adequately sized to support the resource requirements of the virtual machines. You should connect the virtual machines of the same application to the same virtual switch. This will avoid the network traffic between these virtual machines from going through physical network infrastructure, thereby improving network latency. 7 Storage Depending on the number of users and the application workload, Advent database applications may require a high amount of I/O operations on the database storage array. For larger sites, or those that anticipate high workloads, Advent recommends the use of an enterprise-class SAN for storage of virtual machine data and database files. For optimal performance, Advent also recommends that you use separate storage arrays to store the virtual machines that run the application s database server. For example, if you are using a SAN, create a LUN with a dedicated array of spindles to store the APX database files. This will help minimize I/O contention, which is often a concern not only in virtualized environments, but physical environments as well. Advent Software, Inc. 4 February 23, :20 AM

8 8 Frequently Asked Questions 1. Can I get help from Advent Client Support about my VMware questions? Advent Client Support can assist you in troubleshooting issues with Advent applications, but cannot assist in VMware specific questions normally handled by VMware Support. However, Advent Client Support can help you determine whether your VMware environment falls within the support guidelines outlined in this document. 2. I want to move my existing Advent applications to my VMware environment. Who can I speak to? Advent Consulting Services can help you move your Advent applications supported on VMware to your VMware environment. You can find more information about our Consulting Services on Advent Connection at 3. Will I still get support from Advent Client Support if I don t follow these guidelines? Advent Client Support will assist you with questions relating product functionality regardless of whether or not your application is installed in a VMware environment. However, if the Client Support representative determines that the cause of application performance issues you are experiencing may be due to the configuration of your VMware environment, he or she will require that you follow the support guidelines and provide enough resources to the virtual machines before investigating the issue further. This may include moving the Advent Virtual Machines to a dedicated ESX host. 2. Can I distribute Advent VMs across multiple ESX hosts? Yes. Although having VMs that communicate with each other on the same ESX host would reduce network traffic, you can still deploy VMs on separate ESX hosts. Since network traffic in and out of the ESX host is a factor when VMs exist on separate ESX hosts, please refer to our Network recommendations in this document. 3. Is VMware ESXi supported? No. Based on client feedback we have focused our testing to ESX only, and therefore can only support VMware ESX. 4. What are your plans to support Microsoft s Hyper-V or MS Virtual Server? Based on client feedback, we have focused our testing on VMware ESX. We do not have plans to support other virtualization solutions. 5. Why are other Advent products not on the supported products list? We do not have immediate plans to support other Advent products in production VMware environments. We have focused our efforts on products that our clients have requested most often. 6. Can I use VMWare for my Geneva UNIX Server? Because of the heavy disk I/O and memory usage of the Geneva s core UNIX server components, Advent does not support VMWare for your Geneva UNIX Server in a production environment. Clients may use Geneva in virtual environments for uses other than production (for example, Development, User Acceptance Tests, Disaster Recovery). In these Advent Software, Inc. 5 February 23, :20 AM

9 nonproduction implementations, Advent s clients assume all responsibility of planning and accounting for any migration difficulties between virtual environments, and more importantly, from a virtualized environment to a non-virtualized production environment. Advent Software, Inc. 6 February 23, :20 AM

10 9 Appendix 9.1 How Resource Management Works The following resource management tools are available in VMware ESX Server. See the Glossary on page 43 in the Performance Best Practices Guidelines document: for more information on these tools: Resource Pools Resource Pools are used to create a hierarchy of shared resources in an ESX Server to more effectively manage the resources available to Virtual Machines. A resource pool can contain child resource pools, virtual machines, or both. This hierarchy represents successively smaller units of resources as you go down the chain Limits Limits specify an upper limit for CPU or memory for a VM or resource pool. VMware never allocates more resources than the specified limit even if unutilized CPU or memory is available in the system Reservations You can reserve a certain amount of CPU or memory resources to a certain VM in order to give it priority over other VMs. However, this does not prevent another VM from using the reserved resource. When reserved resources are not used, ESX Server makes those resources available to other VMs or Resource Pools Shares Shares specify the relative priority or importance of a VM or resource pool. Since the priority is relative, the actual amount of resources available is a function of the number of sibling virtual machines or Resource Pools within the parent resource pool. Advent Software, Inc. 7 February 23, :20 AM

11 Glossary of Terms ESX Cluster A set of ESX Servers that group resources together. ESX Server A virtualization platform developed by VMware which provides the ability to install one or more Virtual Machines on a physical machine. Guest An operating system that runs inside a virtual machine. Host The physical server running ESX Server which provides the physical resources to the virtual machines. Hypervisor The layer between the physical machine and the virtual machine that controls all resource allocation in a virtual server. Virtual CPU (vcpu) A processor in a virtual machine. Virtual Machine (VM) A virtualized environment in which a guest operating system and associated application software can run. Multiple virtual machines can operate on the same host system concurrently. Virtualization A technology that abstracts physical hardware components from the guest operating system(s) running on a machine. VMware A software company that provides a suite of virtualization solutions; a general term used to reference the technology developed by VMware, Inc, that facilitates virtualization. Advent Software, Inc. 8 February 23, :20 AM