The following are considerations and requirements for the machine hosting the Controller.
Controller Sizing Restrictions
Demo, small, and medium profile Controllers can run on virtual machines that meet the performance requirements otherwise specified. Large deployments are not supported except as indicated in Controller System Requirements.
The Controller is not supported on virtual machines with oversubscribed physical CPUs like T2 AWS instances. These Burstable Performance Instances are CPU-throttled and do not have dedicated storage bandwidth. We recommend you use a Fixed Performance Instance type instead.
Fully Reserved RAM
The memory allocation for the Controller's virtual machine must be fully reserved RAM. Reserve as much as possible of the total memory allocation.
On VMWare VMs
Reserved Memory Configuration
For information on how to configure reserved memory on VMWare, see Set Memory Reservation on a Virtual Machine.
Trend Micro Configuration
On vSphere platforms shipped with Trend Micro, the Trend Micro process needs to be disabled in order for replication jobs to work. You can also add the entire Enterprise Console and Controller directories to the exclusion list to avoid this conflict.
See Trend Micro and VMware Virtualization for more information.
On Hyper-V VMs
On Microsoft Hyper-V, "Dynamic Memory" needs to be disabled and "Static Memory" needs to be enabled.
To disable a Hyper-V VM from using Dynamic Memory:
- Open the Hyper-V Manager.
Select the VM you want to configure in the Virtual Machines pane, making sure the VM is powered off.
You cannot enable or disable Dynamic Memory if the VM is in either the Running or Saved state.
- Right-click the VM to bring up the context menu.
- Select Settings.
- Click the Memory page.
- Uncheck the Enable Dynamic Memory box.
See Virtualization: Optimizing Hyper-V Memory Usage for more information.
Licenses on VMs
The Controller license is bound to the MAC address of the host machine. To run the Controller on a virtual machine, you must ensure that the host virtual machine uses a fixed MAC address.
A factor that often limits the performance of the Controller is the underlying disk I/O performance of the host machine.
Virtual machines, in particular, are less apt to provide sufficient I/O performance requirements for the Controller, compared to similarly specified physical machines. In any case, whether you are deploying the Controller to a physical or virtual machine, you need to ensure that the machine meets the I/O performance requirements set forth in Controller System Requirements.
Host Name Entry
The fully qualified hostname for the application server is the address at which Controller UI users and application agents will use to access the Controller. You specify this hostname when you install the Controller. The hostname needs to be in the /etc/hosts file on the machine.
The following example shows an entry in /etc/hosts with the IP 21.43.65.987, the fully qualified hostname application1.mycompany.com and the alias app1:
Elastic Network Interface (ENI)
For AWS, provision an ENI for each Controller host and link the license to the ENI. For more information about ENI, see the AWS documentation at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html.
