Practices Guide

Active System Manager Virtual Appliance Best Practices for VMware
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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.
Hardware Recommendations
 All VMs, including the Active System Manager virtual appliance, should reside on shared
centralized storage, preferably accessed over 10GbE or Fibre Channel network.
 It is recommended to use a 10GbE vMotion network to dramatically reduce the time
required to migrate a VM.
 Set the BIOS to enable all populated sockets and enable all cores in each socket.
 Enable the processor’s Turbo Mode, if the processor supports this feature.
 Enable hyper-threading in the BIOS.
Virtualization Platform
VMware® vSphere and a hypervisor cluster are not required to deploy the Dell Active System Manager
OVF VM; however, they are required to take advantage of the following advanced features of vSphere.
 vMotion enables live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to
another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction
integrity. This technology is critical to creating a dynamic, automated, and self-optimizing
datacenter.
 Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) continuously monitors utilization across vSphere
servers to intelligently allocate available resources across VMs according to business needs.
It reads information about virtual guest operating systems, resources in use, and available
resources to make informed decisions about load balancing and resource utilization.
 High Availability (HA) provides high availability for applications running on virtual
machines. It automatically monitors the health of ESX hosts, and automatically restarts VMs
on production servers with spare capacity when a host fails. In cases of operating system
failure, HA restarts the affected VM on the same physical server.
 Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability for applications in the event of
server failure by creating a live shadow instance of a VM that is in virtual lockstep with the
primary instance. By allowing instantaneous failover between the two instances, FT
eliminates even the smallest chance of data loss or disruption by triggering seamless
stateful failover when protected VMs fail to respond. Additionally, it creates a new
secondary VM after failover to ensure continuous application protection.
 Site Recovery Manager (SRM) provides seamless site recovery of an entire virtualized data
center by managing storage, VM, and network failover.