ZCM in VMW - Virtual Appliance?

[jmlester]

We're finally moving from NW65/ZW7 to OES/ZCM at all our remote sites (central site has been ZCM for a while now.) Our site servers are all running VMware 5.1 with an OES virtual machine. Is there any reason to NOT use the pre-configured virtual appliances? It seems like a lot less work to spin up a bunch at once since we won't have to do all the OS install and config. I know you lose some of the SUSE management features, but these will only be used for ZCM and patched accordingly with the ZCM updates. It seems like a no brainer, but I just want to be sure there are not any other gotchas.

Thanks,
Jason

[magic31]

jmlester;2249913 wrote:
We're finally moving from NW65/ZW7 to OES/ZCM at all our remote sites (central site has been ZCM for a while now.) Our site servers are all running VMware 5.1 with an OES virtual machine. Is there any reason to NOT use the pre-configured virtual appliances? It seems like a lot less work to spin up a bunch at once since we won't have to do all the OS install and config. I know you lose some of the SUSE management features, but these will only be used for ZCM and patched accordingly with the ZCM updates. It seems like a no brainer, but I just want to be sure there are not any other gotchas.

Thanks,
Jason

Hi Jason,

The ZCM appliance is meant to be easy, but also targeted for smaller environments (I'd say upto 200 max 300 devices).

What is your idea of this setup? 1st rule for each and every primary, is to be as close as possible to the database and with at least a 1 GB low latency connection to it. As soon as you cannot meat this rule, using a satellite is the way to go.

In other words, are you planning on creating a dedicated ZCM appliance (with it's own zone and dedicated database) for each of these sites?

Also, there's "stuff" in the pipeline for 11.3 (ZCM 11 SP3) that might be interesting for what you have in mind, also with the ZCM appliance. How this will exactly work is something that is not yet known to me. But it might be good to keep eyes and ears open for news on new features in ZCM 11.3.


Cheers,
Willem

[jmlester]

The primary servers will remain at our central data center. Each site is connected via either 10Mbps or 100Mbps links. The 10Mbps links will be getting upgraded to 100Mbps this summer. The plan was to install a satellite server at each site running under the existing VMW host. Our heaviest use is Imaging, so that would allow us to keep our imaging traffic on the LAN at each site, like we did with the old NW/ZW7 install.

Any hints as to what is coming in 11.3? I couldn't find anything about it except that it is supposedly coming soon.

[shaunpond]

Jmlester,

> soon.

late this year... could be very late. Once 11.2.3 ships, we have 11.2.4
and 11.2.5 planned before 11.3...

--

Shaun Pond

[jmlester]

Ah, I had 11.2.3 and 11.3 confused.