What prevents VMotion being supported with Ops Manager 3.7?

[dominicb]

I understand from the Operations Manager (DFM) installation guide and posts I have read here that VMWare HA and VMotion features are not supported for an installation of Operations Manager on a VM.

A customer has asked me what the technical reason for this is, can someone confirm? (I am guessing it corrupts the DB or something similar?)

Thanks

Dominic

[adaikkap · Accepted solution]

Hi Dominic,

     Since Sybase don't support VMware HA and Vmotion.Ops-Mgr doesn't support the same.

Yes you are right,since HA doesn't shut the applications there is a possibility of corrupt db.

Regards

adai

[amiller_1]

Hmm....ok....I can kind of understand that for HA. I'm not sure I follow though why vMotion would/could be an issue though....

[adaikkap]

Vmotion isn't but that sybase doesnt we don't.As simple as that.

Regards

adai

[amiller_1]

Ah...understood and thanks for the clarification (I have multiple customers running their Ops Mgr in an ESX VM so wanted to make sure I understood the precise technical reasons/background).

[dominicb]

Thankyou for the feedback, customer is satisfied with this response.

[stephenr]

Hi Adai,

Can you qualify the Sybase don't support vmotion/HA, I can't find any statment on the Sybase website to that effect. All I can find is:

6. Are Sybase products supported on virtualization machines such as VMWare, Xen and MS Virtual Server / Windows Server Virtualization?

Sybase does not explicitly test or certify products running in any virtualization system environment. However, Sybase will support Sybase products running on such environments as long as:

a) the virtualization machine environments is already officially certified and approved by the corresponding OS platform vendor;

b) the OS running in the virtual machine is already officially certified by Sybase (see Platform Certification Site at http://certification.sybase.com/ucr/search.do) Note, however, that if Sybase is unable to reproduce an issue, the customer may be asked to reproduce the problem running natively on the certified OS, without the use of such virtualization systems.

c) Please note that the extent of support does not cover performance. Sybase does not gurantee the performance for any sybase products running on virtual machines.

I know of zero enterprise customers that have VMware environments that don't use DRS initiated vmotion and HA.

Cheers

Steve Ryles

[adaikkap]

The answer is in your post itself.

Since "Sybase does not explicitly test or certify" it has not been tested by QA so it isnt.

Regards

adai

[adaikkap]

Hi Steve,

Hi Steve I would like to take this discussion in email rather than the public forum as some

Information might be sensitive.

Since Sybase hasn’t certified explicitly we haven’t tested that same here.But now there are talks on to whether to

Support or not.

PS: I am adding Raja the ops-mgr lead in the discussion.

Regards

adai

[amiller_1]

I understand wanting to take this offline for a bit to discuss a bit more freely...but in the meantime....is anyone out there actually having issues with Ops Mgr installed on VM's with DRS enabled/vMotion going on?

We have quite a few customers with this setup and haven't seen them having any issues related to vMotion/DRS.

[jeff_spiegel]

We have DFM 3.8 installed on a VM box.  We vmotion it all time and we have never experienced an issue as far as I know.  Netapp does not support this only because they haven't tested it, but it works fine for us.

[amiller_1]

Thanks....good to have some confirmation.

[benjstarratt]

It works fine in a VM.  I've never had an issue with vMotion or svMotion.  I'm running 3.8 now and was running 3.7 before.  64-bit Windows now on vSphere 4.1.  32-bit Windows on VMware 3.5 previously.

[adaikkap]

Starting Ops-Mgr 4.0  VMware Vmotion and HA are supported.The below text is from the Interoperability Matrix Tool .

DataFabric Manager Server 4.0 and above supports VMware VMotion and VMware High Availability features for
- VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5
- VMware vSphere 4

Regards

adai

[jeremyw0411]

I'm hugely relieved by that.

We run Ops Mgr on VMware and have done for years, with DRS and HA and without problem.

If HA has to restart a VM it is no different from the guest's POV to a physical server crashing. I would hope that Sybase is resistant to that scenario because crashes are an unfortunate fact of life in IT and always have been. Though fortunately for us not a common event.

VMotion is transparent to guests (apart from a very small amount of network packet loss) so I don't see how that could cause problems.

[adaikkap]

Now we have the 4.0.1 the GA release of Ops-Mgr, feel free to upgrade and take advantage of fully qualified support for Vmotion and HA, with increased performance.

Regards

adai