I was hoping to know if anyone out there is running BES Server on a ESX or ESXi VM. I read a kb article on the BES site, saying it is not recommended, but the KB is 3 years out of date, and there have been big strides in VM performance since then.
So if you could share your stories, problems, successes of BES Server running on a Multi-Homed ESX or ESXi VM, that would help me greatly. Also, any suggestions for optimizing BES Server for VMWare would be good to know also.
With enough dedicated CPUs, fast disks, and plenty of RAM (especially for MSSQL), yes. If you have more than 10k clients, you may want to consider a physical box instead.
As far as optimizing goes, BES and MSSQL are disk IO intensive. BES makes a lot of small reads and writes. Assuming you’re hosting the database on the same box, extra RAM should help MSSQL perform better and have less of an impact on disk IO.
We are not scared of VMWare for the server affecting performance as much as we think that a shared server will affect performance… we have seen good results from a virtual server running on a dedicated physical machine… The reason that this matters is that the BigFix database will utilize almost all the disk IO on the computer during busy times and it will either affect performance of other things using the computer or vice-versa…
So if the Database is on a different box then there shouldn’t be an issue running the BES server on a VM.
Thanks
William
I’m not sure that’s true either. The BES server itself is resource intensive, especially in larger deployments. It reads/writes a lot of small files (I’m thinking BufferDir and FillDB), so disk IO is still very important. What it really comes down to is, if you want to put BES in a VM you shouldn’t skimp on hardware and dedicated resources. Give it plenty of RAM and put a VM on a RAID that only the BES server will run on. Use fast disks.
One of the nice things about VMWare is that it has a lot of performance monitoring built-in. You should use this to keep an eye on disk IO performance.
I know there are a few people on the forums that run it this way - separate BES / Database servers - both are VM - database vm has dedicated vmfs disk separate from other guests. We do - but we are a small shop. I’ve run it this way at two different companies with great success. If your virtual architecture is done correctly, you’ll have few issues because of it, in my experience. But more often than not, people tend to try to overcommit the virtualized hosts resources and performance suffers.
FWIW - the biggest hit we have experienced has been with Trend. We’ve had to exclude the BES Server / Relay / Client folders to eliminate the performance issue.