Virtualization Considerations; Database Sizing And Performance Considerations; Section 3.5, "Virtualization Considerations - Novell ZENWORKS 10 CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SP3 - SYSTEM PLANNING-DEPLOYMENT-BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 10.3 30-03-2010 System Planning Manual

3.4.4 Database Sizing and Performance Considerations

As a general rule of thumb, Novell has seen that the database size increases at a rate of
approximately 1 GB per one thousand (1,000) devices in the Management Zone.
However, this is not the only consideration to make when designing the Database Server. Best
practices for fault tolerance, maintenance, and performance need to be considered along with the
general calculations for overall database size.
Most larger customers have Service Level Agreements that commit to minimal downtime and
require robust storage capabilities. For sites with more than 10,000 devices, RAID (mirror with
stripe) is recommended for the database, the transaction log, the TempDB, and the TempDB log. In
fact, these four items need to be located on four separate LUNs (four separate disks or four separate
logical arrays of disks). This addresses potential reliability issues.
Database Servers are very sensitive to disk performance. More smaller disks are always faster than
fewer larger disks. This must be discussed while planning the database because a single 10 GB drive
for a site with 10,000 devices might not perform adequately, although it might meet the database
sizing formula. Ten smaller drives should perform much better.
Testing and monitoring are an essential part of database configuration. You must measure the
throughput (MB/sec) that the application is demanding of the database, and size the disk array
accordingly. In addition, the operating system and executables do not have high I/O requirements
and can reside on a mirrored array (a single mirrored pair) to provide reliability with no added
performance.
ZENworks Configuration Management requires a dedicated Database Server that is not shared with
other database applications. This needs to be discussed during the design phase so that everyone
involved in the project (especially the database administrator) is fully aware of the requirements.
This might not be the case in very small implementations of ZENworks Configuration Management.

3.5 Virtualization Considerations

A major consideration for the design of the customer's infrastructure is whether or not the customer
is willing to virtualize some of the ZENworks Configuration Management infrastructure
components. With version 10.2, the components are supported on both VMware* and Xen*. This
could be an excellent low-cost alternative to hosting more ZENworks Configuration Management
servers on fewer physical servers.
For example, if the customer is required to deploy three physical servers in the data center, it might
be possible to increase this number to two or three hosted virtual servers on two physical servers.
This would create additional fault tolerance and redundancy, as well as better performance across
the board.
If the customer is considering running their ZENworks Configuration Management infrastructure on
® ®
either SUSE Enterprise Server (SLES) or Windows Server, technologies such as the PlateSpin
®
product set could also assist, including fault-tolerance capabilities provided by PlateSpin Forge ,
assessment capabilities provided by PowerRecon, and workload management capabilities provided
by PowerConvert.
Gathering Critical Information for Design Activities 37