Installing on a Virtual Machine Image

You can get a download of the Turbonomic platform as a:

  • VMware Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) 1.0 image

  • Microsoft Hyper-V image

Minimum requirements

The requirements for running a Turbonomic instance depend on the deployment method and the size of the environment you are managing.

Turbonomic keeps a real-time representation of your environment in memory. The greater the number of entities to manage, and the more extensive the relationships between them, the more resources you need for the VM that runs Turbonomic. As the VM requirements increase, so do the requirements for the physical machine that hosts the VM.

The requirements that are listed for each deployment method are recommendations that you should keep in mind as you plan your Turbonomic deployment. After deploying Turbonomic, if you need to change memory capacity, CPU capacity, or both for the VM, you can shut it down, make changes, and then power it up again to use the new capacity.

Note:

The machine that hosts the Turbonomic platform must support the SSE4.2 instruction set. Support for this instruction set was introduced at different times for different chip manufacturers:

  • Intel: November 2008

  • AMD: October 2011

The machine that hosts Turbonomic should be newer than these dates. On a Linux system, you can run the following command to check for this support:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep sse4

For more information, see the glossary entry at http://www.cpu-world.com/Glossary/S/SSE4.html.

Usually you can run Turbonomic on a host that meets the following minimum requirements:

Supported VM Image Technology

Storage Requirements

Memory

CPUs

VMware

vCenter versions 7.0 and 8.0

1.75 TB or greater (using Thin provisioning or Thick provisioning)

Note:

The /var partition must be at least 340 GB.

  • Default: 128 GB

  • For 10,000 VMs or less, 64 GB

Note:

If you plan to install a VM with 64 GB of memory, you must modify the default for VM memory.

8 vCPUs

Microsoft

Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 or later

IBM provides a VM image (an OVA or VHD file) which is preconfigured with two hard disk drives. A minimum of 1.80 TB is necessary to ensure that the drives have the proper amount of space for storage.

Installing the platform

You install the platform in two main steps:

  1. Install the Turbonomic VM image on your network.

    This process installs and starts up the VM that hosts your instance of the Turbonomic platform.

  2. Deploy the Turbonomic components on the VM.

Turbonomic VM Image

Turbonomic installs as a VM that runs the Rocky Linux OS. For each new version, IBM delivers a VM image (Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) or Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)) that you install to run the product. Typically, you install this image once, and for subsequent updates to Turbonomic you execute product updates on that installed VM. This means two things:

  • Product updates patch new components of the Turbonomic application stack onto the same Rocky platform that you got when you originally installed the VM image. Product updates do not affect the underlying OS.

  • Over time, you might learn of important security patches for the Rocky distribution. It is your responsibility to keep the OS up to date. You can install these patches on your Turbonomic VM whenever necessary.

Note:

The VM image is released with the Rocky Linux OS since it meets your overall security requirements. Rocky is used as long as it remains viable and secure.

Turbonomic updates

Because IBM continually and rapidly innovates and improves all aspects of this product, newer versions of this product are released every two weeks. For more information about installing updates, see Updating Turbonomic to a New Version.

Turbonomic installs as a Kubernetes cluster on the VM. When you do update the product, the update can change:

  • The application stack

    This comprises several components and services such as:

    • Application services for the user interface, analysis, and other product components.

    • The historical database.

    • Probes, which are components that implement the different targets you can configure.

    For a full list of components in the application stack, you can inspect the platform's cr.yaml file.

  • Data stores

    The installation configures persistent and ephemeral storage for the Turbonomic product to use.

  • Cluster configuration and management services

    This update includes Kubernetes Operator and associated Kubernetes configuration files.