Question on sizing of virtual appliance

[tbatchel]

I have a customer that is installing Balance 4.1.1 and they have more than 1200 vm's/physical servers that they want to monitor.  Since the chart only shows a maximum of 1200, do I have them split up their environment across multiple appliances?  And is that done by the storage or the vcenter side? Or can the appliance handle more since this is a 100% netapp disk shop with vmware 5.0 (upgrading to 5.1)

Also in the resource recommendations there is a minimum disk setting, is that the minimum disks it is monitoring in the storage appliance to give out storage performance?  Or is that the minimum disks behind the storage appliance data store required to handle the IOPS needed?

This customer is looking to have a 3000-4000 server environment by the end of 2014 between their multiple sites.

Thanks, Tom

[moechnig · Accepted solution]

You're going to want to split that environment for scalability reasons.  I've had things get ugly every time I've tried to monitor more than 1200 servers on a single Balance instance, and adding resources didn't help much.  Also, make sure you have enough proxies to ensure that no proxy is monitoring more than 600 servers. 

It's easiest to run one Balance VA per vCenter server, if the numbers work out. 

Your customer may run too many VMs per vCenter to monitor all with a single VA.  I've had one customer with over 2,000 VMs on a single vCenter.  In that case, Balance allows you to include/exclude at the vCluster or host level.  You'll want to use this capability to split the vCenter into manageable subsets. 

The disk requirements listed apply to the storage behind the Balance VA. 

[tbatchel]

That is what I was thinking but wanted someone else to verify it, thanks for the quick response.

[rbaxter]

If you create say 5 Balance servers because the environment is so large, is there a way to report what they all see in one report view??

Having trouble with the viability of multiple servers in a large scale environment if they need to go to 5 different servers.

[lcrewe]

No, unfortunately there is no way to aggregate the reporting from multiple Balance instances to one report.