BMC Atrium Discovery is supplied as a virtual appliance and from version 8.1.1, a kickstart DVD. To install a virtual appliance, see Installing the Virtual Appliance.

Installing from the kickstart DVD

The kickstart DVD can be used to install BMC Atrium Discovery on a customer supplied host that is supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (64-bit only) and equals or exceeds the specification of the HP Proliant DL380 G6 hardware previously shipped as a hardware appliance.

No additional software supported on appliance BMC Atrium Discovery is built as an appliance which is not intended to have any additional software installed on it. The only exception to this is BMC PATROL. BMC Customer Support cannot provide support for any appliances which have had additional software installed.

Installation pre-requisites

Before installing BMC Atrium Discovery from the kickstart DVD you should ensure that you satisfy the following pre-requisites:

• You must be an experienced Linux system administrator
• Your hardware must equal or exceed the specification of the HP G6 hardware previously shipped as a hardware appliance.

Unsupported options As part of the operating system installation you are presented with options that are not supported as part of BMC Atrium Discovery. For example: Encrypt disks option in the partitioning screens Advanced Storage options. IPv6 These are not supported.

Supported physical platform minimum specification

The physical platform onto which you install BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.1.1 must be supported by 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.4. It must also have the following types of components, their equivalents, or better; those used in the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 which was the final production hardware appliance version of BMC Atrium Discovery:

Appliance Sizing guidelines

There are many factors to be taken into consideration when specifying the configuration of the appliance. Every environment is different and consequently the data published here is purely a guide as to how to configure your appliance.

To aid this process we have defined four "classes" of appliance deployment that broadly follow our experience of how BMC Atrium Discovery is deployed in the field. They are differentiated by how many Operating System Instances (OSIs) that are being scanned by BMC Atrium Discovery.

The names given to these classes are of use only in this document and do not relate to the various editions that BMC Atrium Discovery is available in.

The classes are:

• Proof of Concept. Small test deployments of BMC Atrium Discovery, scanning around 150 OSIs.
• Baseline. A typical baseline as offered by BMC. Scanning of around 500 OSIs
• Datacentre. A typical large scale deployment. Scanning around 2000-> 5000 OSIs.
• Consolidated Enterprise. Enterprise scale deployments, typically a Consolidation Appliance taking feeds from many Scanning Appliances. Typically scanning 20000 -> 40000 OSIs.

32 bit appliance memory considerations A 32 bit appliance cannot be used in any deployments requiring more than 4GB RAM. In practice this means that any deployment beyond a proof of concept must use a 64 bit appliance. The memory limit for a 32 bit appliance can be lower than 4GB depending on your environment.

Impact of Appliance Snapshot

The BMC Atrium Discovery Appliance Snapshot feature allows you take a snapshot of the datastore and critical configuration files to facilitate moving the data between appliances.
The process by which the data is packaged means that a considerable overhead of empty disk space is needed to complete the task.

Therefore when providing guidelines for how much disk space to give you Virtual Appliance for the database, whether you intend to perform Appliance Snapshots or not is an important choice to make. If you do plan to make use of this feature then you will need to provision considerably larger disks.

Appliance sizing guide lines - including the ability to perform Appliance Snapshots

Appliance sizing guide lines - not including the ability to perform Appliance Snapshots

For the installation on HP Proliant DL380 G6 systems, the disks must be presented to the OS as two logical disks. For installation on other systems, it is recommended for performance, that you use two logical disks. For single disk installations your sizing calculations should be based on the size of the database (see the table above) plus the size of the OS disk (146 GB).

Installing BMC Atrium Discovery

Partitioning destroys all data on disks Installing BMC Atrium Discovery involves partitioning your disks. Partitioning disks destroys any data on those disks. You should understand partitioning before installing BMC Atrium Discovery.

To install BMC Atrium Discovery from a kickstart DVD:

1. Boot your host using the kickstart DVD. See the documentation supplied with the hardware platform for information on this.
   You are presented with a splash screen which enables you to select installer options. Press F2 to see the supported options. These are:
   • hpdl380g6 to install on an HP Proliant DL380 G6 system configured exactly as specified in HP Proliant DL380 G6 specification. This option performs an installation that completely overwrites any data on the system.
   • custom to customize the installation. This option enables you to set disk partitioning, and network configuration.
     

     Unsuppported boot options At this stage you may specify boot options if for example you wish to customize the install. This however is not supported. See the Red Hat Enterprise Linux documentation for information on boot options.

2. Enter one of the supported options at the boot: prompt and press enter. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux installer starts and you are prompted for partitioning information.
   If the disks have never been partitioned, a partitioning table cannot be read prompt is displayed. Click Yes to proceed.
   

   Partitioning destroys all data on disks.

   If you use the hpdl380g6 option to install on an HP Proliant DL380 G6 system, the rest of the installation is automated. When it is complete, remove the DVD and reboot. You are then presented with a BMC Atrium Discovery banner providing networking information.

   • Select the Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout from the partitioning scheme selection drop down list.
   • Do not select the Encrypt system option.
   • Select the Review and modify partitioning layout option.
3. Click next. The Review Partitioning screen is displayed.
4. Delete VolGroup00 or create the partitions in this volume using the sizes described in the table below as a guide.
5. If you have deleted VolGroup00, delete all remaining partitions on all disks and enter the following partition information for the first disk:
   

   Mountpoint	Type	Size (MB)
   	swap	8192
   /boot	ext3	100
   /	ext3	1000
   /tmp	ext3	2000
   /var	ext3	2500
   /home	ext3	1500
   /usr	ext3	1 (Fill to maximum allowable space.)

6. Enter the following partition information for the second disk or volume (if used):
   

   Mountpoint	Type	Size (MB)
   /mnt/disk2	ext3	1 (Fill to maximum allowable space.)

7. A warning stating that you have chosen to remove all partitions is displayed. Click Yes to proceed.
8. Click next. The Networking screen is displayed.
9. Enter the required networking information.
10. Click next. The partitioning and installation of the operating system begins. This may take some time. When the installation has completed, remove the DVD and click the Reboot button.
11. When the system reboots, you are presented with a default Linux login prompt. Log in as the root user with the tidewayroot password.
12. For a twin disk installation, change the owner of the mountpoint for the second disk or volume to be the tideway user. For example, if the mountpoint is /mnt/disk2 enter this command:
    chown tideway:tideway /mnt/disk2
13. Enter the following command:
    su - tideway -c /usr/tideway/bin/tw_custom_dvd_config
    This creates the database.
14. You are prompted for the location. The default is /usr/tideway on a single disk installation. For a twin disk installation, enter the mountpoint of your second disk. You are asked for confirmation.
15. You are asked whether networking has been configured. Confirm that it has.
16. Now you must reboot your system. Enter the following command:
    /sbin/reboot
    The tideway services may take a while to start while the patterns are being uploaded. The procedure is now complete.