SIM running on a Virtual Machine client...

[Doug Barry]

In April of last year I installed SIM4.2 on a Microsoft Virtual Machine client setup just for this, knowing HP did not say this was supported. I got it up and running with about 10 servers loaded in it. It ran beautifully. Eventually I setup many of our critical servers (about 30) and it still ran great.

4 months later I began a project to update all 130 of our ProLiant servers and put them all into SIM. When I reached about 50-60 range the performance became slow and it took long periods of time to pull information. It still ran though. As soon as I inputted 100 servers it basically became unusable. The CPU would run at 100% and the only fix was to stop the SIM service. I read many similar listings on this forum relating to this but with non-VM installs and tried every suggestion I found. Nothing works for this problem on a VM as I can not install the ProLiant pack directly on the VM client. It was already installed on my VM host. I did try to upgrade 4.2 to 5.0 and ran into several database security issues. This left me with no other option but to set SIM5.0 up on an old ProLiant DL380G1, which runs fine but now we have the upkeep of an old dedicated server.

I am posting this in hopes that a fix might become available shortly. I ran SIM on a VM client for about 4 months with around 30 servers and was pleased with the results. My boss would still like to run SIM this way (but with all 130 servers)as it is very cost effective.

[Jens Schröder]

Hi, so what's your question? My experience with HP SIM is that it requires quite a bit of computing power. You can improve performance by combining it with a tunable and well scalable database and installing the database on a different machine. On top we've chosen different locations, i.e. partitions for data, backups, logs and software repository. But OK, we're managing nearly 2000 Systems with HP SIM and I'd never have taken into consideration running HP SIM inside a virtual machine, which itself consumes performance ...

[Doug Barry]

So my question would be: How fast does my VM host have to be and how much ram do I need assigned to my VM client if I want to run SIM inside it? Thus far, the answer has been, it is not supported...yet. So, I am then asking, when will it be supported (because Hp is saying yet not it never will be)?

I assume if you are pulling 2000 servers worth of data with SIM, then you have a dedicated server that only runs SIM. The cost conscious business that I am in would rather share resources (with other apps) on a faster server. As noted, this worked perfectly up to about 50 servers being pulled. We have several VM hosts and continue to like its flexibility/cost effective ratio.

Doug