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 help or Administrator Guide.