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3 Posts
0
139672
May 21st, 2010 00:00
vFoglight, vRanger & vCenter
Hi all.
We've recently upgraded our virtual environment to vSphere 4U1 with 6 ESX Blades connected into vCenter.
We currently have vRanger and vCenter installed on the same physical box attached to the SAN. It is currently backing up ok.
My question is we now have the intention to run vFoglight. I have read that vFoglight enjoys utilising as much resource as it can get and best practice is to install it on its own box. Are any of the scenarios viewed as being 'ok' to do?
1. Install all three products (vCenter, vRanger, vFoglight) on the same physical box.
2. Install vCenter and vFoglight on the same physical box, and vRanger on a virtual machine.
3. Install vRanger and vCenter on the same physical box (essentially a backup box) and vFoglight on it's own virtual.
4. All seperated (and if so, which best suits being on the physical box). (don't really prefer this as I'm trying to consolidate servers)
Hopefully someone can shed some light on this one and I can get working.
Cheers for that.
Regards
Feng
We've recently upgraded our virtual environment to vSphere 4U1 with 6 ESX Blades connected into vCenter.
We currently have vRanger and vCenter installed on the same physical box attached to the SAN. It is currently backing up ok.
My question is we now have the intention to run vFoglight. I have read that vFoglight enjoys utilising as much resource as it can get and best practice is to install it on its own box. Are any of the scenarios viewed as being 'ok' to do?
1. Install all three products (vCenter, vRanger, vFoglight) on the same physical box.
2. Install vCenter and vFoglight on the same physical box, and vRanger on a virtual machine.
3. Install vRanger and vCenter on the same physical box (essentially a backup box) and vFoglight on it's own virtual.
4. All seperated (and if so, which best suits being on the physical box). (don't really prefer this as I'm trying to consolidate servers)
Hopefully someone can shed some light on this one and I can get working.
Cheers for that.
Regards
Feng
rcrockett
3 Posts
0
May 21st, 2010 17:00
1) No, don't do it. You will be stressing that machine too much with all three product running on it.
2) Not recommended either, as vCenter performs many vital operations (snapshotting, migrating of VMs, cloning, HA, etc.), and the last thing you want is vFoglight "starving" this machine of the resources it needs.
3) Not recommended either, although I've seen it done before. This, in my mind, creates unnecessary risk, as if you lose your VC machine, you also lose the vRanger machine, etc, and it would hinder your DR effort.
4) If you need SAN-based backups, you need to have vRanger on a physical machine. You could "get by" with the configuration in #3, but once again, several reasons not to do it. The vRanger physical machine does NOT have to be ultra powerful, though, so maybe you could get by with an older server dedicated to it? If you are willing to go direct-to-target LAN-based backups, then a VM for vRanger is perfectly adequate, as it's not moving much data (the ESX hosts bear the burden there). You might want to compare the cost-benefit, depending on how large your environment is, and how long your backup window is. We have fairly large customers who are perfectly happy with LAN-based backups.
I hope that helps..
markusnemetz1
9 Posts
0
May 21st, 2010 07:00
We have installed Virtual Center,vRanger (4) and vConverter on the same VM. vFoglight is installed on a separate VM. There is no problem.
However
1. We have ESX 3.5 with VC 2.5
2. Set VC Web Services HTTP Port e.g. to 81 (in archived forums there are some related posts)
Hope there is some help.
Markus
wmw4
3 Posts
0
September 21st, 2010 00:00
In our environment we have been using vFoglight for over a year now. We also have a small environment, 4 ESX servers, which we recently upgraded to Vsphere.
We run Vcenter on a VM, we use a dedicated physical server for our backups, including vRanger, and we use a dedicated physical machine for vFoglight.
I would advise you to put vFoglight on a dedicated machine. My experience with vFoglight is that it is a resource-intensive application to run. When we first installed vFoglight, we installed everything on a single machine, including all agent managers and agents you will need. This resulted in such a bad performance of vFoglight that it had no use working with it anymore. We were waiting for data to appear on screen, and when it finally did, we doubted that it were the correct values.
Now we have a multi-tier environment, and finally vFoglight performs like it should.
So if you can, install on a dedicated, 64 bits machine. And put in as much memory in the machine as fits in.
Hope this helps you a bit.
Regards
Wouter
auscoit
3 Posts
0
September 21st, 2010 00:00
Our environment isn't overly large (only 6 production ESX servers).
Is the CPU allocation tunable, or is only really memory that I need to be concerned about. Is the 64bit version of vFoglight also limited to 4GB as well? Does that mean the remaining 4GB RAM could be utilised for vCenter or vRanger (or both)?
Thank you for your input thus far.
Regards
Feng
auscoit
3 Posts
0
September 21st, 2010 19:00
Thank you for your reply. I am currently in the process of moving vCenter off the vRanger server and also hosting the DB in a SQL 2005 server (as opposed to SQL Express), but am going to keep vFoglight in a VM and allocate resources as required. I don't have access to any more physical boxes and vRanger needs to stay on the physical backup box due to it having direct fibre access.
Thanks for all your help everyone.