Installing a BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance

Pre-requisites

You have identified a server onto which you will deploy your BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance
The server has sufficient spare resources to support the intended configuration of the VA.
You have identified the VMware Administrator who will be installing the VA.

VMware Virtual Infrastructure (ESX/ESXi)

To install the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance onto VMware Virtual Infrastrucuture (ESX/ESXi) you must convert the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance to a suitable format.

The major steps in this procedure are outlined below. For full information, see the VMware documentation (pdf).

Copy and extract the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance zip file to the local file system.
Start the VMware Converter Standalone Client.
Launch the "Convert Machine" Wizard
Select "VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine" as the source type.
Enter the path and filename for the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance vmx file.
Select "VMware Infrastructure virtual machine" as the destination type and enter the relevant connection details.
Specify the Virtual machine name and datastore location for the target system.
Review the configuration and proceed.

Once the conversion process is complete you can manage the Virtual Appliance with the appropriate VMware Infrastructure client.

VMware Server v2

To install the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance on VMware Server version 2, perform the following steps on the VMware server host:

Copy and extract the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance zip file to the local file system that is defined as the VMware Server Datastore.
Start the VMware Server web interface.
From the Virtual Machine menu, select Add Virtual Machine to Inventory.
Expand the datastore icon that includes the directory containing the unzipped BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance.
Select the *.vmx file in that directory.
Click OK to load the file.
Select the newly added VM from the inventory.
The main panel shows the settings for the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance. It is recommended that you do not change any of these settings.
Click the green start button to start the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance.
- When starting for the first time, you may be prompted about your identifier. It is recommended that you choose the relevant option to create a new identifier. This ensures that the MAC address of the Network Interface Card is unique and avoids any conflicts.
The IP address of the virtual appliance is displayed at the console login. Make a note of this to use when accessing the BMC Atrium Discovery UI through your browser.

Post Installation

Important Post Installation Steps
It is important to consider the following steps after installing.

VMware Tools
Installing VMware Tools
Setting up NTP
Localizing the 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.

VMware Tools

VMware Tools is required but is not installed on the shipped BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance, as the correct version of the tools is dependent on the version of the VMware host. When you have installed the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance, you must always install VMware Tools.

Installing VMware Tools

The following procedure describes how to install VMware Tools. For full information, see the documentation available on the VMware Support site:

From VMware Infrastructure Client, right click on the virtual machine in the left pane.
Select Install/Upgrade VMware Tools. This makes a virtual CD device available to the VM.
Log onto the virtual machine CLI, and become root.
Issue the following commands (change the RPM or tar file name below to the version presented by your ESX server):
1. mkdir /mnt/cdrom
2. mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
  Enter one of the following commands depending on whether VMware Tools is supplied on the virtual CD as an RPM, or a tar file.
  1. If you have an rpm enter the following command:
    rpm -i /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-7.7.5-156745.i386.rpm
    umount /mnt/cdrom
  2. If there is a tar file, enter the following commands:
    cd /tmp
    tar zxvf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-7.7.5-156745.tar.gz
    umount /mnt/cdrom
    cd vmware-tools-distrib
    ./vmware-install.pl
Respond to the configuration questions on the screen. Press Enter to accept the default value.

Setting up NTP

It is essential to configure ntp on your BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance. If significant clock skews occur then it can impact the functioning of the system or even prevent the BMC Atrium Discovery product from starting. A guide on how to do this can be found here

VMware have documented their recommended timekeeping best practices for Linux based VMs. The KnowledgeBase article can be found here.

Localizing the appliance

This section describes setting localization options such as the keyboard layout and the timezone.

Setting the Keyboard Layout

The console keyboard layout can be changed using the loadkeys command. You should use this temporary approach to test that a keyboard layout works correctly. Once you have determined that the layout works correctly, you should make the change permanent, as described below. To change the keyboard layout to a US layout, enter the following command:

[tideway@london01 ~]$ loadkeys us
[tideway@london01 ~]$

To change the keyboard layout to a UK layout, enter the following command:

[tideway@london01 ~]$ loadkeys uk
[tideway@london01 ~]$

To make a change permanent, you must change the KEYTABLE variable in the /etc/sysconfig/keyboard file. For example, to change the keyboard layout to a US layout, use the following:

KEYTABLE="us"

The keyboard mapping files can be found in /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/ but usually you can use the 2-letter
ISO Country Code. See the [ISO website|http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists
/english_country_names_and_code_elements.htm] to find the code for the country you require. For example, us (United States), uk (United Kingdom), de (Germany), and no (Norway)).

Setting the System Timezone

The system-wide timezone in Linux is defined by the file /etc/localtime. This file is either a copy of or a link to one of the timezone data files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/. These files contain all the timezone and daylight savings rules for a particular location, for example /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London contains all the data for London. These files are part of the base packages installed by the system (they are from the tzdata package in RHEL and Fedora).

To set the timezone, as the root user, copy or link the relevant file from /usr/share/zoneinfo. For example, to set the time to New York time:

[root@london01 ~]$ mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.old
[root@london01 ~]$ ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime
[root@london01 ~]$

Setting the System Time

You can set the time using the date command. For example, to set the current date to ten past twelve on 13 October 2009, enter the following command:

[root@london01 ~]$ date -s "12:10:00 20090102"
Tue Oct 13 12:10:00 BST 2009
[root@london01 ~]$

The format for the date string is HH:MM:SS YYYYMMDD.

You can also configure the appliance to synchronize the internal clock to an ntp server. In this example, the ntp server's name is time.bigcorp.com. Add the following line under the OUR TIMESERVERS comment in /etc/ntp.conf:

server time.bigcorp.com

Also add the ntp server's name to the /etc/ntp/step-tickers file. No other content should be required.

OVF

BMC now provide an experimental and unsupported OVF version of the Community Edition Virtual Appliance.
This has been shown to import and run successfully in both Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. A third party tool called Kensho (built by Citrix) is needed in order to import the OVF Virtual Appliance into these products.

There follows a brief summary of the steps required to import the OVF, however it is strongly recommended that the user follows the documentation provided by Kensho on this process. The Kensho tools must be installed and some configuration of the target Hyper-V / XenServer hosts is required.

Importing OVF

Guest OS
Internal testing has shown that the BMC Atrium Discovery Virtual Appliance runs successfully in a Microsoft Hyper-V instance. However at the time of release it remains the case that the Operating System used (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) is not a supported guest for Hyper-V.

The following steps are performed in the Kensho tool. The steps are applicable to both importing into Hyper-V and XenServer, any differences are highlighted.

Select the "Import" tab
Select the Hyper-V/XenServer instance into which you are importing the OVF
Select the appropriate VM from the Library
- A value should appear in the "Mapping" box and should be "Required"
Do not click the "force" button as a mapping between the hardware defined in the OVF with that available in the Hyper-V/XenServer server needs to be performed.
Select the triangle on the Kensho toolbar to open the mapping window
Firstly map the Virtual Machine to the target server
Map the Virtual Machine to the target server NIC
Map the Vitual Machine to the required target share. If there are multiple VM storage locations it will show these so make sure you pick the correct host & the correct share on that host. Then click "Done".
Once complete log on the the Hyper-V/XenServer system and launch the Hyper-V manager/XenServer console client.
The Virtual Machine should be listed.

Hyper-V only steps:
Before starting he VM for the first time e need to ensure there are no network driver issues. To do this we must use the "legacy" network device emulation built into Hyper-V.
Right click on the imported VM and select "settings"
Select the network adapter (titled ethernet port) and "remove"
At the top of the left pane select "add hardware"
Select "legacy network adapter" and select "Add"
From the "Network" drop down select the available device.
Leave the MAC Address selection as "Dynamic" and select "OK"

Start the VM.

Next Steps

Once the Virtual Appliance is installed it is a good time to configure it to have sufficient resources for its intended use. Doing so now will be easier than extending the resources once the Virtual Appliance has been in use for some time.

See Configuring the Virtual Appliance for details.

BMC Software