I’m really pleased to announce the availability of an excellent new, long-awaited, and much anticipated Best Practice Paper on configuring EV in VMware environments. This has been written by Dan Strydom, from the EV TFE team, and is based on input from Engineering, the field, partners, support etc., as well as Dan’s extensive research. It’s probably more accurate to say it’s about the best practice of designing/configuring VMware to be optimal for EV, rather than the other way around. The document contains the following:
Choosing the Right Platform for Enterprise Vault
Sizing Enterprise Vault 10 for VMware
Differences in Versions and Editions of VMware
ESX Host Configuration
Optimizing VMware for Enterprise Vault
CPU configuration
Memory Configuration
Disk Configuration
Number of virtual machines per LUN
Enterprise Vault per Server Storage Locations
Choosing Suitable Storage for Index Locations
General ESXi Storage Recommendations
Network Configuration
Performance Impact of Upgrading to Enterprise Vault 10 from Earlier Versions
Virtualizing SQL Server
Other Deployment Recommendations
General VMware Recommendations
Disable Anti-Virus for Index Locations
Pagefile Size
Index Volume Fragmentation
Ongoing Maintenance
Performance Monitoring
Windows Performance Counters
APPENDIX A – VMware Enhancements to Deployment and Operations
I think that it’s absolutely required reading for anyone who will be designing or implementing an EV solution on VMware. As always, please feel free to send us feedback, either direct to Dan or myself or to dl-eng-evtfe@symantec.com
Andy
