Performance Management server hardware requirements based on system configuration

The Performance Management server must be installed on a supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. See http://ibm.biz/spcr-pmserver.

Server requirements based on system configuration

IBM Performance Management maintains several databases and can drive thousands of disk transfers per second. When you choose a system to run the Performance Management server, select a system with multiple hard disk drives (HDD) available (as shown in Table 1 and Table 2), and avoid the use of disk drives that are shared with other disk intensive workloads. In virtual environments, consult with the virtual host owner to ensure adequate I/O capacity is available on the host.

The results of scale testing indicate that a Performance Management server installed on a medium or large configuration server as shown in these tables can support up to 20 concurrent users.

Agent rows written per minute and disk space estimates for databases

To estimate the number of agent rows of data that is uploaded per minute and the disk space required for the DB2 and MongoDB databases, use the spreadsheet from APM Developer Center > Load projections.

Number of processors

The suggested core count is based on enterprise class CPUs released in the past 1-5 years. Older CPUs might require extra cores to achieve the same performance. You can consult the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation website (http://www.spec.org) and look for a processor with a SPECint2006 value greater than 30. 

Number of processors in extra small environments

Although two processor cores are supported in extra small environments, four processor cores are preferred for optimal Performance Management user experience. Increasing the number and speed of the processor cores improves performance and reduces the time that is required to stop and restart the server components.

Disk space

This estimate is for the amount of disk space that is required for an average installation of this monitored environment size. Your disk space usages might vary based on the number and types of agents that are installed and the monitored transaction count (not in the IBM Monitoring environment). For a more detailed estimate of disk usage for your environment, use the spreadsheet from APM Developer Center > Load projections.

HDD count

The hard disk drive (HDD) count is the total number of drives a workload is spread over in a striped or RAID 0 array (for improved I/O performance). For data protection, it is best to use RAID 10, which doubles the HDD count required. RAID 5 is not advisable for the DB2 server due to the write penalty that is incurred. Best practice is to use RAID controller or hard disk caching (with battery backup) to achieve the disk latency that is critical for database operations. The drive counts can be adjusted based on the speed and latency of your I/O system drives and controllers.

Monitored user transactions per second

When a user interacts with an application like a web page, multiple monitored components can be involved with each transaction. An application can have various levels of complexity. These estimates assume 5 - 7 monitored components are involved in an average user transaction.

My Components

If you configure a small environment of fewer than 50 managed systems, the Application Performance Dashboard has an application called My Components. This predefined application includes the managed systems that were discovered by the Performance Management server and cannot be edited or deleted.

To ensure optimal performance in the Performance Management console, environments with more than 50 managed systems do not have the My Components application. To define applications for viewing in the dashboard, see Managing applications.

Remote DB2 server

For more information about using an external DB2 server in the Performance Management server configuration, see Connecting to a remote DB2 server.

JVM heap size

Based on how the installer classifies the system, the JVM heap size is set for the Performance Management services to the values shown in Table 3. If you update the environment after installation by adding memory or processors such that it matches a different size classification (for example, from extra small to small), run the server_size.sh script to reconfigure the JVM heap size settings. For more information, see Managing the JVM heap size and DB2 bufferpool.