ISS Technology Update, Volume 6 Number 10 - Newsletter

ISS Technology Update Volume 6, Number 10

Table 3-1. Pre-packaged reference configurations

Reference Configurations from HP SIM Sizer Utility

100 Nodes Solution

Single core 3.0 GHz/800 MHz

1 GB RAM

15,000 RPM Ultra320 SCSI

500 Nodes Solution

Dual core 3.2 GHz/1066 MHz

1 GB RAM

10,000 RPM SAS

2000 Nodes Solution

2 x Dual core 3.2 GHz/1066 MHz

3 GB RAM

15,000 RPM SAS

5000 Nodes Solution

2 x Quad core 2.33 GHz/1333 MHz

8 GB RAM

15,000 RPM SAS

The first thing this should tell you is that environments of 1000+ units probably are not a good match for a virtualized HP SIM

since we are getting up into the range of needing four cores for the application. Always keep in mind that customer

expectations vary, and what is good for one customer is not always good for another.

Probably the most compelling decision to be made regards the Service Essentials Remote Support Pack. This was first delivered

with HP SIM 5.1 and brings some of the OSEM/ISEE technology into HP SIM along with Contract and Warranty reporting. To

ensure the health of the “service point of presence” the implementation was designed to run only on a physical ProLiant server

so that the diagnostics would be available to provide continuous operation. Whether that is a good or a bad design decision

is not being debated here—the important thing to consider is that if you choose to host HP SIM in a Virtual Machine you cannot

use the Service Essentials Remote Support Pack!

That is not a light decision. Customers who implement the Remote Support Pack are very quickly coming to depend on it. It

means freeing up the time spent manually tracking contract and warranty details. They also report that first-time-fix ratios go up

because better information is available to the tech; because of this, the tech is more likely to arrive with the correct part. This all

results in a reduction of down time, and we all know that’s a good thing.

With that in mind, it is hard to justify ever hosting HP SIM in a virtual machine, but if you must, here are some tips to keep in

mind:

• As stated above, always start with the HP SIM Sizer to define the size of the VM required

• If possible, go above and beyond the sizer’s recommendations

• Choose the highest performance disk option available (for example, more spindles=more performance)

• Because there is a lot of network traffic generated during discovery, identification and data collection, best practice is to

provide a dedicated physical NIC for the HP SIM VM (that is, do not have multiple VMs using a vSwitch along with the HP

SIM VM that terminates with the same physical NIC)

There are other best practices not related to VMs that make sense in application here as well, such as having the HP SIM CMS

be connected as close to the network core as possible; more ”hops” means more latency. Also, keep in mind that there is

always Server Migration Pack – Universal Edition. That is, if you do get an HP SIM instance set up in a virtual machine and it is

not up to the customer’s expectations, do not worry—you can do a Virtual to ProLiant (V2ProLiant) conversion and make

everyone happy!