Practices Guide

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. After the

host restarts and joins the vCenter cluster, take the host out of Maintenance Mode, as

described in VMware documentation. If DRS is enabled on the cluster, it will automatically

balance the VMs use the extra capacity made available by taking the newly patched host out of

Maintenance Mode.

Disaster Recovery

Best practices for disaster recovery include:

 It is recommended to host the Active System Manager VM appliance in an HA-enabled cluster.

Both host and VM monitoring should be enabled.

 If uninterrupted access to the Active System Manager appliance is required, then it is critical to

enable FT.

 The expectation is to have independent (and possibly multiple) Active System Manager

appliances within a datacenter (for example, one appliance in production and one for disaster

recovery). Therefore, it is recommended to disable SRM for Active System Manager VMs.

For detailed instructions on configuring these features, see VMware documentation.

Scalability

Best practices for implementing a scalable infrastructure include:

 For best performance, limit each Active System Manager appliance to a maximum of 12 chassis,

each with a maximum of 32 blade servers (384 servers in total).

 Multiple Active System Manager appliances can run concurrently in the same vSphere cluster.

 While it is possible to run multiple Active System Manager appliances on the same management

network, it is recommended to run each Active System Manager appliance on an independent

management network.

Sources

 http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/Improving-VMware-ESX-Server-performance-10-best-

practices

 http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/

 http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/features.html

 VMware white paper Best Practices for Building Virtual Appliances

(http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1011)

 VMware white paper Enterprise Java Applications on VMware Best Practices Guide

(http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Enterprise-Java-Applications-on-VMware-Best-

Practices-Guide.pdf)