VMWare Guidelines

GigaSpaces applications fully support the following:

  • Using virtual machines to host GigaSpaces and GigaSpaces applications and components.
  • Deployment on virtualized environments running on VMWare Type 1 Hypervisors. This includes all major product features and APIs, including data access, messaging, code execution, local cache, remoting and persistency.

There are certain guidelines regarding virtual machines that should be followed when setting up the production environment, in order to ensure stability and optimal performance. For more information, refer to JVM Tuning.

Supported Versions

GigaSpaces applications support VMWare vSphere 5+ running the following guest operating systems:

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2
  • Linux RHEL 6/7+
  • Solaris 10

SUSE-10 Linux Enterprise Service Pack 3 is not recommended, due to the instability of its network support layer.

Configuration

  • Only Type 1 Hypervisor is recommended for production use.
  • vCPU may be over-subscribed, if it is under-utilized (less than 50%). In environments with high CPU utilization, vCPU must be reserved (pinned).
  • Hyper-threading should be enabled.
  • vMEM must be reserved (pinned).

Other Considerations

  • Do not over-commit virtual memory.
  • Reserve memory at the virtual machine level.
  • When using replication, use anti-affinity rules to ensure that primary and backup nodes do not share the same virtual machine and physical host.
  • Reserve sufficient memory for the operating system (~2GB per virtual machine).

References

High-performance settings should be used, per VMWare's recommendations here and here.