TM1 and VMWare

[mzatta]

Does anyone have a copy of the IBM statement regarding using TM1 on VMWare please?

marco

[Martin Ryan]

Someone may correct me on this but I don't believe they have a statement on it. They support operating systems and are not fussed on how those operating systems are running.

[MSidat]

Mzatta,

I would be very cautious if considering using vmware especially if you are on a big server farm with other power hungry apps, We had all sort of issues when IT (an outsourcing company - I wont name names) decided it was best to give us a Virtual environment. The performance was so inconsistent and dire.

If you have decent technical/architecture/server people who can set it up properly and support it then fine, but otherwise i would stick with physical.

As far as I recall our issues were down to how the environment allocated out CPU/RAM usage. We had defined that we wanted dedicated cpu/ram for the instance but for some reason when it wasnt being utilised it was lent out to other envirnment on the same farm so when it came to the time that we had some users running intensive Tis, or big queries they could not get back the resource.

Hope this helps in your decision making.

[asutcliffe]

Someone may correct me on this but I don't believe they have a statement on it. They support operating systems and are not fussed on how those operating systems are running.

This tallies with what an IBM rep told me a couple of years ago about TM1 and virtualisation in general.

I would be very cautious if considering using vmware especially if you are on a big server farm with other power hungry apps, We had all sort of issues when IT (an outsourcing company - I wont name names) decided it was best to give us a Virtual environment. The performance was so inconsistent and dire.

If you have decent technical/architecture/server people who can set it up properly and support it then fine, but otherwise i would stick with physical.

FWIW, I've worked at a couple of places running TM1 in a VM and it worked very well. Of course the infrastructure was managed in house and I suspect there was a little more attention to detail than you might get from a third party.

[Mike Cowie]

Hi All:

We also have quite a few TM1 customers that run their TM1 Servers as virtual servers, and have not had any issues as a result of that configuration, provided resources (namely RAM & CPU) can be dedicated to the TM1 virtual "box". If you try and configure your TM1 VM server to have any sort of pooled/shared RAM & CPU between VM images then you're asking for serious performance trouble.

As to IBM's support of running production TM1 servers in a virtual environment, I know for a long time the line I was told was that it should work and should not be a problem, but the "catch" always seemed to be that if you're in a support situation there's always a risk that IBM support will tell you to reproduce an issue on a non-virtual server. If you go right now to supported environments for TM1 9.5.2 (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27020888) you'll see that VMWare ESX is listed as "Compatible", a status that is sort of explained here (I know it's around EP, but you get the idea): http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg21347341

I think IBM's line on virtual servers running TM1 may change soon, though. I was on a call recently with IBM and a customer specifically to get IBM to clarify for the customer whether or not they'd be at risk from a support perspective if they ran a production TM1 Server on a VM. After a bit of back-and-forth, someone in TM1 product development confirmed that IBM's intention is to officially support TM1 production servers running on VMWare provided resources (again, mainly RAM & CPU) are dedicated to the TM1 virtual server. When this statement will be 100% official, I don't know, but it sounded as though it's going to become the official line soon, particularly given the number of customers already running this configuration without a problem.

The only other things to be aware of with running TM1 Servers in a virtual environment center around licensing. My understanding from this recent call I was on with IBM are the following potential licensing items:

• IBM's PVU calculations aren't yet designed to account for the realities of VM server environments. I'm no expert, at all, on PVU calculations, but my understanding is that it is the physical VMWare host server's CPU's type (2 socket, 4 socket, etc) that drives the PVU calculation regardless of how CPU's/cores are actually allocated to the TM1 Server VM image. In other words, if your VMWare server has 4 socket CPUs installed and you allocate 8 cores to your TM1 VM Server, the PVU pricing will be based on a TM1 Server with 8 cores and a 4-socket CPU type (which requires more PVUs than a 2-socket CPU and obviously costs more $$$$).
• IBM is apparently requiring that customers install ILMT (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/p ... l/faq.html) in their virtual environments to monitor core usage over time. I've yet to install this, but I get the sense that it's A) a pain to install and B) puts some additional PVU licensing monitoring burden on customers when compared to a customer using a physical server.

Hope this helps a bit.

Regards,
Mike

[skinners666]

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27014782

NB the unless otherwise stated bit.