Virtual Machine Requirements

This article provides the requirements of the known virtual machines at the time of publication. Virtual machine requirements are provided in the datasheets of the individual products and should be consulted to ensure the latest requirements are considered.

In case of a conflict between the information presented in this document and the product datasheets, the information in the product datasheets will prevail.

• CPU requirements are based on a minimum CPU clock speed of 2.4 GHz
• CPU requirements are based on a 64-bit architecture
• Virtual cores must be mapped 1:1 to a CPU hyper-thread
• As an example, a 4-core system with two hyper-threads per core is considered to provide eight virtual cores
• Network requirements are based on a minimum port speed of 100 Mbps (1Gbits/sec recommended)
• Disk requirements are based on SSD backed storage with average random read and write latency of 100 us or better

Skylight orchestrator

Skylight orchestrator is available as a KVM as well as a VMware virtual machine.

CPU Requirements

Skylight orchestrator requires to be assigned a minimum of 6-virtual cores.

Memory Requirements

Skylight orchestrator requires to be assigned a minimum 30 GB of RAM.

Interface Requirements

Skylight orchestrator requires at least one physical network interface and can map up to eight interfaces. These will be represented as ports within the virtual machine with designations of eth0 through eth7. The host interfaces do not need to be dedicated to the virtual machine.

The following mapping modes are supported:

• KVM Virtual Machine
• Macvtap in bridge mode, Guest support for virtio drivers
• VMware Virtual Machine
• VMware bridge Guest support for VMXNET 2 and VMXNET 3 drivers (VMXNET 3 recommended)

Disk Requirements

Skylight orchestrator ships with a default disk image size of 150 GB. This configuration is meant for proof of concept type and/or small footprint deployments where up to 1000 performance sessions or 100 performance elements are managed.

Production deployments to reach full engineering guidelines typically require:

• 400 GB of disk space for 5000 performance elements and 20,000 performance sessions with one week of performance session data retention
• 430 GB of disk space for no performance elements and 52, 000 performance sessions with one week of performance session data retention

Additional weeks of retention can be supported by increasing the disk space taking into account each week of additional data retention. Please refer to Determining the Quantity and Size of Virtual Disks for disk sizing guidelines for the product.

In all cases, disk storage must be backed by SSD drives. Startup and upgrade issues can arise if slower drives are used. The storage must be able to sustain a disk I/O load of 5K reads and writes per second at an average write size of 6Kbytes.

RAID Recommendation

Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is a storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units. Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways, known as RAID levels. This is dependent on the redundancy level and performance required.

RAID 1 configuration is recommended for HPE Gen9 or Gen10 when using KVM host.

RAID 10 configuration is recommended to optimize performance and protect data for Skylight orchestrator hosts.

Skylight sensor: control

For information on requirements see Virtual Machine Installation for Skylight sensor: control.