ESXi host server
This topic provides information about the Context Store hardware requirements. For information about the Avaya Breeze® platform requirements, see the Interoperability chapter in Avaya Breeze® platform Overview and Specification.
The requirements specified here are not applicable to all deployments options. For more information about the hardware requirements of the certified deployment scenarios, see Certified Deployments section in Avaya Context Store Snap-in Release Notes.
Context Store supports a range of deployment options from a single node cluster to an Avaya Breeze® platform cluster with a maximum of five nodes. As a failover strategy to ensure maximum availability of the solution, Avaya recommends that at least two Avaya Breeze® platform servers be deployed. The servers must be on different VMware ESXi hosts. To guarantee service availability and to ensure high availability of the solution, it is recommended that three servers be used. If you install any or all three Avaya Breeze® platform servers on the same host, then the failure of the host impacts multiple Avaya Breeze® platform servers. The failure of multiple servers prevents Context Store from using a backup server during failover and hence impacts the overall availability of the solution.
Note:
The specifications provided here are for a reference implementation. This is the implementation on which Context Store’s capacity and performance figures have been certified. Equivalent performance cannot be guaranteed in environments which do not meet the hardware and network requirements stated here.
Processor: For the specified best performance, the processor should have at least 8 dedicated, non-hyper-threaded cores, equivalent to a 2.9 GHz Xeon processor.
To ensure that the Context Store solution can support published capacity figures and availability, Avaya recommends that you reserve the processor to achieve maximum traffic rate with low latencies, especially when Context Store is recovering from a failure. Without dedicated cores, Context Store competes with other Virtual Machines on the same VMWare ESXi host for crucial resources at times of maximum throughput or recovery, resulting in poor performance or loss of data.
Hyper-Threading must not be enabled. Context Store does not support VM features that sub divide the processing power of the core, because it does not expect to have to compete with external processes during max capacity or failover where Context Store requires additional processing overhead to ensure no service interruption.
vMotion must not be enabled: Context Store has not certified this feature, and hence it is recommended that this feature not be used during the running of Context Store.
Storage: Must at least be 15000 RPM SATA hard disks.
For best performance, network must:
Support at least Gigabit Ethernet
Have a response time of less than 250 milliseconds between hosts.
Be able to handle a transfer rate of 48 mb/sec
Have all hosts on the same Data Center, on the same subnet and on the same high quality LAN, so no latencies are incurred in the solution. Note that the use of VLAN is not recommended, because capacity testing executed on a VLAN environment resulted in poor performance. Frequent connection issues were also seen within the cluster, between geo-redundant clusters, and to an External Data Mart.
Have a dedicated 1 GB channel with a minimum of 300 MB bandwidth being available for Session Replication between the Context Store clusters, if Context Store’s Geo Redundancy feature is used.
