Network Bandwidth And Policy Update Frequency; Ace Policy Configuration; Load Balancers - VMware ACE Management Server Administrator's Manual

Network Bandwidth and Policy Update Frequency

The amount of network bandwidth that ACE Management Server and ACE instances require depends on the
frequency of policy updates that you configure. Table
use a policy update frequency value of 10 minutes.
Table 2-3. Network Bandwidth Required with a Policy Update Frequency of 10 Minutes
Number of Clients
100
1,000
10,000
VMware recommends that for large deployments (more than 5,000 clients), you increase the time between
policy updates by clients because this reduces the amount of required bandwidth.
Table 2‐4 shows the bandwidth needed when the policy update frequency value is set to 30 minutes.
Table 2-4. Network Bandwidth Required with a Policy Update Frequency of 30 Minutes
Number of Clients
100
1,000
10,000
The amount of network bandwidth required can also be higher if your policy set is very complex.
VMware recommends that you have a separate network link between ACE Management Server and your
database server, so that traffic coming and going from ACE Management Server to its clients does not interfere
with the traffic to and from your database server.

ACE Policy Configuration

The configuration of ACE policies can affect performance. You can increase the amount of data that is
transferred between ACE Management Server and ACE Player by using one of the following methods:

Host policies – Enabling host policies (such as host network quarantine) requires that a host‐side daemon
retrieves the host policies from the ACE Management Server.

Complex network quarantine policies – If the set of rules that makes up your network quarantine is very
large, the transfer of these rules from the ACE Management Server to the clients can affect the scalability.
The numbers shown in Table 2‐3 and Table
rule sets for network quarantine. You can view the size of your policy set by examining the ACE file
directory and counting the size of the .vmpl file. An average policy set is 15KB or less.

Load Balancers

The ACE Management Server client‐server protocol is built on top of the HTTPS protocol. You can use HTTP
load‐balancing software and hardware solutions to scale an ACE Management Server deployment beyond the
capacity of a single server (or for high‐availability deployments).
ACE Management Server scales in a linear fashion when an enterprise‐grade HTTPS load balancer is used. See
Chapter 5, "Load‐Balancing Multiple ACE Management Server Instances," on page 39.
VMware, Inc.
Chapter 2 Planning an ACE Management Server Deployment
2‐3 shows the amount of bandwidth needed when you
Bandwidth Required
0.125Mb/sec.
1.25Mb/sec.
12.5Mb/sec.
Bandwidth Required
0.04Mb/sec.
0.4Mb/sec.
4Mb/sec.
2‐4 are estimates of required bandwidth given average‐size
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