Mobility XE and VMware^TM ESX

Technical Note 2232

Last Reviewed 16-Jul-2010
Applies to:
Mobility XE server and warehouse

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Summary

This tech note lists the guidelines that must be followed when running Mobility XE on VMware^TM ESX.

VMware^TM ESX is the only virtualization environment supported by NetMotion for full system capacity and performance. At a minimum, each mobility server running in an ESX Virtual Guest must have the same resources allocated to it as though it were running in a non-virtualized environment. Use the following guidelines for configuring each Virtual Guest:

• Mobility XE functionality is supported in VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server environments running on top of a desktop or server operating system, however capacity and performance within these environments is lower due to the overhead of the virtualization environment.
• The Mobility server, the Mobility reporting server, the reporting database and/or warehouse can run in a virtual server environment, either with VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server. NetMotion Wireless uses VMware^TM ESX, VMware Workstation, and Microsoft Virtual Server in day-to-day operations, in both test and technical support. These configurations work well and we are not aware of incompatibilities.
• For a deployment with fewer than 100 users, you can install a Small Deployment Server (where the Mobility server, warehouse, and Analytics Module are on the same computer) in the same virtual server instance.
• In virtualization environments other than VMware ESX, NetMotion Wireless currently makes no quantitative claims with respect to system capacity or performance when running Mobility XE.

Glossary

• Virtual Guest - A running instance of a virtual machine. An emulated physical machine.
• Virtual Host - A machine running VMware^TM ESX that hosts Virtual Guests.
• Mobility XE server components - Mobility XE server and Mobility warehouse.

Running Mobility XE on VMware^TM ESX

NetMotion Wireless supports installing and running the Mobility XE server components on virtual systems running VMware^TM ESX. NetMotion strongly recommends the VMware ^TM ESX platform for virtual machine deployments serving more than 1000 users. Other virtualization products may be used for smaller deployments (see tech note 2215 for supported configurations on non-ESX VMware^TM and Microsoft Virtual Server ^TM. All features and functions of Mobility XE are supported on VMware"! ESX with the exceptions and capacity limitations listed below. 

The following configuration guidelines must be observed when running Mobility XE in a virtual environment. NetMotion Wireless does not support running Mobility XE in a manner not consistent with these guidelines.

1. Variable CPU capacity and overloaded VMware^TM ESX hosts cause erratic and unpredictable results and are not supported.
2. The only supported and tested Virtual Guest CPU settings are for 1 and 2 processors. The physical hardware that VMware^TM ESX runs on can have more processors available - however, due to scheduling issues, increasing the number of processors used by a single Virtual Guest can decrease performance.
3. Advanced setting variations on VMware^TM ESX are not supported at this time. Only use the default values for Advanced Settings.
4. The redundancy of a Standby warehouse is eliminated if both the standby and primary warehouse Virtual Guests are running on the same host machine. For an ESX pool, you must set the affinity of each warehouse Virtual Guest to different hosts to keep them from load-balancing to the same hardware.

Mobility XE has been tested running in Virtual Guests on a cluster of Virtual Hosts configured with shared disk storage to allow NetMotion Mobility to migrate a Virtual Guest from one Virtual Host to another for either load balancing or high availability purposes.

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