Avaya Oceana® virtual machine RAM requirements

Full RAM reservations must be implemented for all Avaya Oceana® / Avaya Breeze® platform nodes and the Omnichannel Windows server running on the customer-provided VMware hardware and software infrastructure. See the product documentation for Avaya Control Manager and Avaya Aura® for guidelines on memory reservations for those products that form part of Avaya Oceana®.

For Avaya Pod Fx deployments, RAM reservations are not required as this platform is engineered by Avaya for maximum supported capacities in terms of memory requirements.

• The VMware reservation on memory must match the memory requirement of the virtual machine for Avaya Breeze® platform nodes and the Omnichannel Windows server.

Avaya Oceana® virtual machine CPU requirements

Full vCPU reservations must be implemented for all Avaya Oceana® / Avaya Breeze® platform nodes and the Omnichannel Windows server running on the customer-provided VMware hardware and software infrastructure. See the product documentation for Avaya Control Manager and Avaya Aura® for guidelines on vCPU reservations for those products that form part of Avaya Oceana®.

For Avaya Pod Fx deployments, vCPU reservations are not required as this platform is engineered by Avaya for maximum supported capacities in terms of vCPU requirements.

• Hyperthreading support is not available on any Avaya Oceana® / Avaya Breeze® platform nodes as vCPU reservations are required.

• CPU reservations are calculated in terms of processor cycles MHz/GHz. See the VMware documentation for calculations of total processor cycles for a given number of vCPUs.

• When selecting the distribution of cores per socket for each virtual machine, use the VMware-provided defaults. For example, for 8 vCPUs, VMware sets by default a flat and wide selection of 1 core per socket across 8 sockets.

• Ensure that you deploy the same physical CPU type across all Avaya Oceana® / Avaya Breeze® platform clusters. Mixing of CPU types is not supported on the different physical hosts running Avaya Oceana® / Avaya Breeze® platform virtual machines.

• The VMware reservation on CPU must match the number of vCPU assigned to the virtual machine times the individual clock speed of the vCPU for the Avaya Breeze® platform nodes and the Omnichannel Windows server.

• The VMware reservation on the CPU count must match the CPU requirement for Avaya Breeze® platform nodes and the Omnichannel Windows server.

• The VMware CPU benchmark must minimally match a Dual (2 Socket) E5-2697 V3 @2.6GHz processor.

• This is a 2 CPU socket configuration meaning 2 CPUs. This reference dual processor benchmark score and thread rating is published on https://www.cpubenchmark.net.

• The VMware CPU benchmark for the VMware physical host running Avaya Oceana® and Avaya Analytics™ must be equal to or greater than 90% of the individual core benchmark and thread value score for the Avaya Oceana® reference dual processor.

• Other VMware settings and capabilities that can be supported or not supported in an Avaya Oceana® deployment are presented in a table in later sections of this document.

Avaya Oceana® VMware physical host server minimum CPU specification

Configure each VMware virtual machine with CPU resources to support Avaya Oceana®. For each virtual machine and required agent count, configure a specified number of vCPU cores and CPU reservations in MHz’s

Avaya Oceana® VMware profiling uses a Dual 14-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 V3 2.60 GHz CPU as a reference CPU. This reference processor has 28 physical CPU cores. Each of the cores has an individual benchmark value that is one twenty-eighth of the overall benchmark score of the reference processor. You use this individual core benchmark value to compare the cores from different processors and to select suitable VMware host hardware for Avaya Oceana® virtualization.

The individual core benchmark value for the processor in your VMware host server must be equal to or greater than 90% of the individual core benchmark value for Avaya Oceana® reference processor.

Do the following to ensure that your proposed VMware host CPUs meet the Contact Center minimum requirements:

• Using the https://www.cpubenchmark.net website, determine the individual core benchmark value for the reference CPU, Dual 14-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 V3 2.60GHz.

  Reference individual core benchmark value = Reference CPU benchmark from the website /Number of cores in the reference CPU.

• Using the https://www.cpubenchmark.net website, determine the individual core benchmark value for your chosen VMware physical host server CPU.

  Individual core benchmark value = Your chosen physical host server CPU benchmark from the website / Number of cores in the host server CPU.

• To support Contact Center virtualization, the individual core benchmark value of your chosen VMware physical host must be equal to or greater than 90% of the reference individual core benchmark value.

• To support Contact Center, your chosen physical VMware host must have a sufficient number of CPU cores with each core having at least the minimum individual core benchmark value.

  For more information, see Working example - CPU Model [Dual CPU] Intel Xeon Gold 6240R @ 2.40GHz 24 Core Processor for Avaya Oceana Breeze Virtual Machines.

Avaya Oceana®, Avaya Analytics™, and VMware snapshot considerations

VMware snapshots save the current state of the virtual machine so that you can return to the current state at any time. Snapshots are useful when you need to revert a virtual machine repeatedly to the same state, but you do not want to create multiple virtual machines.

Snapshots are permitted on Avaya Oceana® and Avaya Breeze® platform virtual machines for maintenance and upgrade purposes.

The following considerations apply when using snapshots with Avaya Oceana® on VMware:

Creation of snapshots:

• A maintenance window is required as snapshots must only be taken while all the Avaya Oceana® and Avaya Analytics™ virtual machines are in a powered down state. It reduces the risk of data corruption and significantly reduces the time taken to create the snapshots.

• Avaya recommends that additional disk space is provisioned before any snapshot is taken so that you have space available for the snapshot and virtual machine.

  A guiding figure for the minimum additional disk space that must be provisioned for each Avaya Oceana® virtual machine is 50% of the disk space required for the virtual machine. For example, if an Avaya Oceana® virtual machine requires 200 GB disk space for normal operation, then you must have 100 GB additional disk space for snapshots, which means that you must have total 300 GB disk space.

• The time taken to create a snapshot is minimal when the virtual machine is in a powered off state.

• All snapshots must be taken on Avaya Oceana® virtual machines at the same time.

• A snapshot can only be in place during the system maintenance window assigned for the activity.

Removal of snapshots:

• Avaya recommends that you remove all snapshots from the physical host within 8 hours after completion of maintenance tests or any software upgrade, patching, or migration activity. Keeping a snapshot on the physical host can lead to performance issues resulting in a loss of contact center capabilities.

• All snapshots must be removed from all Avaya Oceana® virtual machines at the same time.

• Avaya Oceana® virtual machines must be powered down prior to removing snapshots to reduce the risk of data corruption and significantly reduce the times taken to consolidate the changes back to the original disks.

  The time can be considerable depending on the amount of change. For example, software change, workload under snapshot, or snapshot duration.

• Avaya Oceana® and Avaya Analytics™ maintenance windows must build in time for the removal of all snapshots.

  Time required to remove snapshots is more than the time required to create them.

Restoration of snapshots:

• Avaya Oceana® and Avaya Analytics™ virtual machines must be powered down prior to restoring snapshots to reduce the risk of data corruption and significantly reduce the times taken to consolidate the changes back to the original disks.

  The time can be considerable depending on the amount of change. For example, software change, workload under snapshot, or snapshot duration.

• All snapshots must be restored from all Avaya Oceana® virtual machines at the same time.

• When restoring snapshots, carefully consider the possible impact from out-of-date antivirus definitions, missed operating system updates, and lapsed domain accounts on the contact center. Isolate the restored virtual machine until these issues are resolved.

VMware Performance Monitoring Guidelines

• For Performance and Monitoring tools and capabilities, see the Interpreting esxtop Statistics document at https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279 to investigate and avoid performance problems at the virtualization layer.

• Observe the following for using esxtop data at the host level:

  • CPU Load Average: A load average of 1.00 specifies that the physical CPUs of the host are fully utilized. A load average of 0.5 specifies that the physical CPUs of the host are half utilized. Any value greater than 1 specifies performance problems.

    Note:

    Performance problems can also occur with values less than 1.

• Physical CPU: Performance is impacted if the Physical CPU consistently exceeds the 70% level. Ensure that the Physical CPU usage does not consistently exceed 70%. Short spikes of up to 80% are tolerated.

• VMware provides additional tools such as esxtop and resxtop for determining performance characteristics. Esxtop and VMware Infrastructure Clients provide large quantities of performance data for all levels of granularity, from host through Virtual Machine and per vCPU. Observe the following for using esxtop data at the Virtual Machine level:

  • RDY: The percentage of time that something is waiting for a CPU to be available to take its workload. Ensure that RDY does not exceed 5% for any vCPU.

  • MLMTD: The percentage of time that a vCPU was waiting due to a limit set on the Virtual Machine for CPU usage. Ensure that you increase or remove your limit if this value is greater than 0.

Avaya Oceana® physical host requirements

Avaya Oceana® Cluster 1 has the largest cluster size in terms of Avaya Breeze® platform nodes. Avaya Oceana® Cluster 1 contains three Avaya Breeze® platform nodes deployed as virtual machines. This requirement is applicable for all Avaya Oceana® footprints from 100 to 4500 agents. Therefore, the minimum number of supported physical hosts required for an Avaya Oceana® deployment is three. This is to ensure a minimum level of redundancy for Avaya Oceana® Cluster 1 nodes where each node must be deployed on a different physical host.

• Other Avaya Breeze® platform nodes from Avaya Oceana® Cluster 2, Avaya Oceana® Cluster 3, Avaya Oceana® Cluster 4, or Avaya Oceana® Cluster 5 can be deployed across 1, 2 or 3 of these physical hosts to maximize redundancy for these clusters in addition to Avaya Oceana® Cluster 1.

• In all circumstances, avoid deploying multiple nodes from the same cluster on one physical host.

• The nodes of Avaya Oceana® Cluster 1, Avaya Oceana® Cluster 2, Avaya Oceana® Cluster 3, Avaya Oceana® Cluster 4, and Avaya Oceana® Cluster 5 can share a common physical host with no restrictions on which physical host they are located on or other Breeze Node they co-share the host with for normal operations.

• Avaya has published an application PSN (PSN005416U) https://downloads.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/101057845 on the Avaya Support website at http://support.avaya.com. The PSN provides details about using VMware DRS affinity rules to locate Avaya Oceana® cluster nodes to specified physical hosts.