One benefit of installing NetMRI as a virtual appliance is the ability to dynamically allocate additional resources to NetMRI. Additional resources can be in the form of additional vCPUs, additional memory, or additional storage for NetMRI. The following sections describe each resource:

Adding vCPUs

Adding additional vCPUs to the NetMRI virtual appliance should be done in accordance with the VMware administration guide. No additional configuration of NetMRI is needed when adding additional processors. But more is not always better. Due to context-switching, adding additional vCPUs to NetMRI may hurt performance.

Adding Memory

Allocating additional memory to the NetMRI virtual appliance should be done in accordance with the VMware administration guide. If the amount of memory being added to NetMRI exceeds 3.6 GB, then NetMRI will need to have the PAE kernel enabled. Download the latest version of NetMRI, and then update it in the admin shell using procedures provided in the Manually updating NetMRI Software section of the NetMRI online help or Administrator Guide.

Adding Storage

Allocating additional storage to the NetMRI virtual appliance should be done by adding storage as RDM or VMDK-based disks. Configure the disks as additional storage in NetMRI by following the steps outlined in the NetMRI Database Management > Storage Management topic in the NetMRI online help or Administrator Guide.

Network Adapters

To change NetMRI's interfaces, do the following:

1. Shut down NetMRI. Do not proceed to the next step until after NetMRI is down.
2. Remove or add an interface. If you are adding an interface, be sure that its type is the same as that of the interface(s) that NetMRI is already using; do not mix interfaces.
3. Update the number of interfaces.
4. Restart NetMRI.

Let's consider an example.
If net1 is deleted and NetMRI is restarted, the interface number starting with eth2 will decrease by 1 upon restart but the number will not decrease on the hypervisor side. For this reason, when you add an interface, the hypervisor side will display net1 rather than netN+1; in addition, the system will display ethN+1. After you restart the system, this interface will become eth1, the previous eth1 will become eth2, and so on.