Virtual Machine Best Practices

Follow the points below to ensure efficient VM-based Collector operation:

1. Disable or adjust VM performance monitoring systems for the product.
   • Because Operations Center VMs tend to be extremely I/O intensive, with continuous 100% CPU utilization, vSphere performance monitoring should be reduced or disabled.
     
     
2. Avoid placing multiple NetMRI instances on the same host.

Operations Center/NetMRI instances present significant demands on I/O, particularly on virtual machine hosts. Avoid attempting to run Operations Center appliance instances on hosts with other VMs.

• • Avoid sharing storage with other virtual applications.
  • Use dedicated local storage if at all possible.
  • For network-based storage, assign dedicated spindles to the virtual machine.

3. In the host, use a high-quality RAID controller.

1. • Operations Center and NetMRI virtual machines are sensitive to RAID controller quality, such as using software RAID or a RAID controller on the motherboard. Using these options is in fact worse than using no RAID at all.
   • Infoblox recommends an enterprise-grade controller with a battery-backed write cache.
   • Infoblox recommends use of RAID-10.

4. Enable Intel VT options in the BIOS of the host system.