Relay running on Virtual Host

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by Tim.Rice)

I thought I recently read a statement somewhere talking about limitations on installing Relay’s on Virtual Guest OS’s (VMware, etc). but I can’t find it again.

Something about each host with a Relay installed needing to be on different NIC’s for performance reasons. I gotta start keeping better notes!!

I’m getting pressure from our upper management to create VMware guests to hosts the Relays so that they can all be located in our data center(s) rather than scattered physically around the network. Given the number of endpoints I;m supporting, I would really rather not go that route.

Any help locating the document again would be greatly appreciated.

2

(imported comment written by StacyLee)

Tim,

I’ve heard this before and not sure if it was an official document or a statement of best practice. Up until last year we ran 18 dedicated relays in 2 data centers serving our campus. We are in the process of converting to what we call Super Relays. We purchased 2 Dell PowerEdge R720 and filled it with 16 hard drives, the fastest CPUs, lots of RAM and 4 quad port nics, installed Server 2012 datacenter edition. The first 2 drives are dedicated to the OS, we use HyperV and for each guest we installed server 2012 standard with its own dedicated NIC and drive with bigfix relay application on each guest. We worked with our networking team to ensure each NIC had a 1GB connection then trunk them around campus where it made sense to make them closer to the clients.

We now have 2 Server 2012 Hyper V servers running 24 bigfix relays the client connections are spread evenly (+/- 100 clients per relay). This was our experiment last year and it was so successful we ordered 2 more super relays and plan to have 4 physical host with 50 guest relays trunked around the campus.

So in short it is possible to run them virtual but it will not likely play nice with an existing VMware setup unless they high performance with 10G nics and more. We were concerned we could be pushing or pulling so much data from the campus that we can cause a DoS on the other guests.

Thanks

Stacy Lee

Stanford University

3

(imported comment written by Tim.Rice)

Sounds like an interesting experiment.

I would love to hear more about how it works out.

I’m using a mix of dedicated, non-dedicated, and Virtual Relays. I’m getting pressure to convert to all Virtual, but we have multiple remote locations serviced by WAN links and I’m trying to gather supporting documentation to keep distributed relays in some cases.