Security

We are looking to put NSM onto one of our VMWare boxes, we are running ESX 3.5. Is there any known issues with running NSM on this type of a box?

Hi,

 

This is taken from the installtion guide for NSM

 

Server must be dedicated to running NSM.

NSM should not be installed on virtual systems such as VMWare and

Microsoft VM Server due to high system I/O requirements.

 

I dont know where this would leave you with NSM being supported by Juniper. I know that they dont officially support other management software like CMS for wan acceleration when in a VMware installtion. You might want to check with JTAC on support for this or someone on here might be able to clarify this for you.

 

I have had customers install it on ESX with the only problems being the high CPU and resource useage when pushing policies, especially if you are managaing IDP. That was about a year ago so I dont know if it is any different now. Other than that I havent seen any problems inregards to managing devices. I run NSM in VMware on my laptop for testing with no problem apart from resources.

 

Hope this helps

 

Andy

Hi All,

 

It's not supported :(, you might get help from here but if you go to JTAC they will say it's an unsupported platform.

 

Details of the _only_ supported platforms are in the related documentation.

 

Thanks

 

Ben

I am running a trial for a customer who has installed an IDP-8200 into their production network. We are running NSM-2007.3 under VMWare.

 

Nothing to add in terms of Juniper non-support - but we have not had any issues to date running it under VMWare -allocated plenty of memory and 2 processors for it and so far the performance has been more than acceptable.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Thank you to all of you for your information. I will contact Juniper support to verify just to be sure. I will update this just so everyone is in the loop.

Just to confirm nothing has changed, Juniper does not support VMWare but they know of people using it.

i have been running NSM 2006.x and now on vmware ESX server 3.0 for almost 3 years now, and have recently upgraded to esx server 3.5 and NSM 2007.3r3. The nsm server was managing about 80 devices and i did not have any problems at all. the guest os was rhel and that did have an issue with the clock slowly getting out of sync, so the logs when running NSM were affected by this. but since i switched to centos47 as the guest os, and upgraded to esx3.5 that issue doesnt occur anymore

We run NSM in VMware but only in lab environments. Even in the lab, we see issues related to I/O bottlenecks associated with virtualized systems. (The little red exclamation point in the NSM that indicates connectivity prlblems is blinking constantly, and typically goes away when the lab firewalls stop sending massive amounts of logs to the NSM.)

 

My suggestion: Ok to do it in a lab or development environement; assuming you don't need support from Juniper. I would never deploy this in production.

 

I agree with CrytpoManiac.  I have NSM running on a VM without issues, but this is just for lab testing purposes.  I have also seen NSM installed on a VM that was experiencing very strange issues.  I would not recommend installing NSM on a VM in a production enterprise environment.  You will also not be able to get the support you need if running in a VM.

Does anyone know of any future plans to support NSM on VMWare?  Currently using NSMXpress, so this is a relatively small deployment.

 

Chris

Hi,

 

I need to know of, NSM on VMware is supported or no for the last version ??

 

Thanks.

 

Best Regards,

Khaled

Yes, NSM is now supported on VMware.

Hi Steve,

This is really interesting. Currently we deploy NSM (for 9 x SSG550 - FW only setup) with a Primary and DR setup (GUI and device on each).We are lookng to migrate to virtual estste and would like to deloy NSM in the estate.

I've tried to find some recommended specs for a VM platform but can only find physical specs from the installation guide.

Now that Juniper will be supporting NSM on VmWare,  will Juniper be providing recommended vm deployment specifcations ?

 

Any thoughts are very welcome?

 

Simon baker.  

I'm not able to find an specs recommendation.  When we made the move from solaris to VMware we simply looked at the actual usage on the server for cpu, ram and disk io to size the VM for the migration.