Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware This Dell technical white paper provides information about best practices for configuring Active System Manager Virtual Appliance in a VMware environment.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind. © 2013 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dell and the Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Inc.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 4 Hardware Recommendations ....................................................................................... 4 Virtualization Platform .............................................................................................. 4 Configuring the Active System Manager Virtual Appliance .....................
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware Introduction The purpose of this white paper is to describe best practices for configuring, backing up, restoring, and updating the Active System Manager virtual appliance in a VMware environment. It also includes recommendations for hardware, virtualization platform, disaster recovery, scalability, sizing virtual machines (VMs), and managing virtual machine snapshots.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware Configuring the Active System Manager Virtual Appliance When configuring an Active System Manager appliance, best practices include: Remove/disable any virtual hardware that the appliance does not need, including floppy drives, CD drives, USB ports, and so on, as described in the Vmware documentation. Use SCSI virtual disks whenever possible.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware reservations that fully commit cluster capacity can prevent DRS from migrating virtual machines between hosts. The Active System Manager appliance requires a minimum of two virtual CPUs (vCPUs); however, it is important to make sure that the total number of vCPUs assigned to all VMs does not utilize more than 80% of the ESX host’s CPU. Minimizing use of the Memory Balloon driver, as well as swapping, requires allocating 8GB of reserved RAM.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware This pattern continues with each additional snapshot, resulting in what is called the “snapshot chain.” It is important to remember: Snapshots do not replace a comprehensive backup strategy. Use snapshots prior to applying a guest operating system or application patches. Specifically for Active System Manager, create a snapshot prior to applying Active System Manager patches or making fundamental configuration changes.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware Place the vSphere hypervisor host running the Active System Manager virtual appliance into Maintenance Mode, as described in VMware documentation. If DRS is enabled, then vMotion will automatically migrate the VMs to other available hosts using vMotion. Apply ESX patches according to VMware recommendations, and then restart the host.
Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware VMware white paper Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1 (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf) VMware white paper VMware vSphere vMotion Architecture, Performance and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5 (http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmotion-perf-vsphere5.
