BMC Atrium Discovery is supplied as a virtual appliance and 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 certain customer supplied hardware. See Installation pre-requisites.

No additional software is supported on the appliance BMC Atrium Discovery is built as an appliance that 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 on which additional software is installed.

No OS customizations are supported on the appliance The BMC Atrium Discovery software is delivered as an appliance model (either virtual or physical), and includes the entire software stack from a Linux operating system to the BMC application software. The operating system must not be treated for general purpose use, but rather as a tightly integrated part of the BMC Atrium Discovery solution. As such, customizations to the operating system should only be made at the command line level if explicitly described in this online documentation, or explicitly instructed by BMC Customer Support. Any other changes will render the appliance unsupported. If you are unclear as to the impact of a potential customization, please contact BMC Customer Support for guidance.

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.

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
• You must be installing on one of the following platforms:
  • Dell PowerEdge R710
  • HP Proliant DL380 G6
  • Other hardware that is supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (64-bit only). Your hardware must equal or exceed the specification of the HP Proliant DL380 G6 hardware previously shipped as a hardware appliance.

A facility for installation on a 32 bit machine is not available.

Supported physical platform minimum specification

The physical platform onto which you install BMC Atrium Discovery 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. These are the components used in the Dell PowerEdge R710 system configured exactly as specified in Dell PowerEdge R710 of BMC Atrium Discovery.

Links to the relevant support sites are provided below:

• Dell PowerEdge R710
• HP ProLiant DL380 G6
• VMware virtual machine

Appliance sizing guidelines

Click here for detailed information on determining the required specification for your appliance.

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.

The following guidelines are based on typical deployments in the field, and are intended to serve only as recommended configurations for your environment.

This section defines four "classes" of appliance deployment that broadly follow 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, time-limited test deployments of BMC Atrium Discovery, scanning up to 150 OSIs.
• Baseline. A typical baseline as offered by BMC. Scanning up to 500 OSIs.
• Datacentre. A typical large scale deployment. Scanning up to 5000 OSIs.
• Consolidated Enterprise. Enterprise scale deployments, typically a Consolidation Appliance taking feeds from many Scanning Appliances. Typically scanning or consolidating up to 20000 OSIs, though at these levels, a weekly scanning or focused scanning strategy may need to be adopted.

Proof of Concept The Proof of Concept class has minimal storage allowance as they are only intended for a limited period of scanning such as a week long trial. For longer periods or a continuously used development or UAT system, the Baseline class is the minimum recommended.

Memory and swap considerations

The recommended figures for memory provide a good level of performance in typical scenarios. The upper level should not be considered a limit, BMC Atrium Discovery will make use of available memory. You can determine whether additional memory is needed in your appliance by monitoring swap usage.

The recommended figures for swap can be exceeded, there is no harm in doing so. It may prove simpler to configure the higher quantity of swap than to extend an existing swap partition as this will allow the RAM demand to be derived as above. Note that all virtual appliances are initially configured with 8 GB swap.

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.

Memory and swap usage Memory and swap usage depends on the nature of the discovery being performed, with Mainframe and VMware (vCenter/vSphere) devices requiring more than basic UNIX and Windows devices.

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 your Virtual Appliance for the database, you must first decide whether you intend to perform Appliance Snapshots. If so, then you will need to provision considerably larger disks.

Where the following tables refer to CPUs, full use of a logical CPU (core) is assumed. For example, if eight CPUs are required, then you may provide them in the following ways:

• Eight virtual CPUs in your virtualization platform, such as VMware Infrastructure.
• Four dual core physical CPUs.
• Two quad core physical CPUs.

Appliance sizing guidelines

Resource	POC	Baseline	Datacentre	Consolidated Enterprise
CPUs	2	2	4	4 to 8
RAM (GB)	2 to 4	4 to 8	8 to 16	16 to 32
Swap Space (GB)	2 to 4	4 to 8	8 to 16	16 to 32
DB Disk (GB) No snapshot	37	100	200	200 to 660
DB Disk (GB) With snapshot	37	200	500	660 to 1500

VMware maximums The following are the maximum supported limits for the main deployment platforms. VMWare Server v2 - 2 CPUs & 8GB RAM VMWare Infrastructure 3.0.2 - 4 CPUs & 16GB RAM VMWare Infrastructure 3.5 - 4 CPUs & 65GB RAM VMWare Infrastructure 4 - 8 CPUs & 255GB RAM Note that ESX version 4 can support up to 8 vCPUs, earlier versions have a maximum of 4.

A facility for installation on a 32 bit machine is not available.

Supported physical platform minimum specification

The physical platform onto which you install BMC Atrium Discovery 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. These are the components used in the Dell PowerEdge R710 system configured exactly as specified in Dell PowerEdge R710 of BMC Atrium Discovery.

Component	Description
CPU	2 x Intel Xeon E5620 Processor (2.40GHz, 4C, 12M Cache, 5.86 GT/s QPI, 80W TDP,Turbo, HT), DDR3-1066MHz
RAM	Dell 24GB Memory for 2CPU (6x4GB Dual Rank LV RDIMMs) 1333MHz

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:
   • dellr710 to install on a Dell PowerEdge R710 system configured exactly as specified in Dell PowerEdge R710. This option performs an installation that completely overwrites any data on the system.
   • 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.
     

     Unsupported 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.
   
   • If you use the dellr710 or the hpdl380g6 option to install on a Dell PowerEdge R710 system, or HP Proliant DL380 G6 system respectively, most of the installation is automated, though you do have to configure networking.
   • When the Networking screen is displayed, enter the required networking information and 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. You will then be presented with a BMC Atrium Discovery banner providing networking information.
   • If you use the custom option, continue with this procedure.
3. Select the Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout option from the partitioning scheme selection drop down list.
4. Do not select the Encrypt system option.
5. Select the Review and modify partitioning layout option.
   

   Partitioning destroys all data on disks.

6. Click next. The Review Partitioning screen is displayed.
7. Delete VolGroup00 or create the partitions in this volume using the sizes described in the table below as a guide.
8. 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	16384 Where you have a large amount of RAM (16 GB or more) the amount of swap that you allocate should be the same as the amount of RAM.
   /boot	ext3	100
   /	ext3	1000
   /tmp	ext3	2000
   /var	ext3	2500
   /home	ext3	1500
   /usr	ext3	1 (Fill to maximum allowable space.)

9. 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.)

10. Click next. The Networking screen is displayed.
11. Enter the required networking information.
12. 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.
13. When the system reboots, you are presented with a default Linux login prompt. Log in as the root user with the tidewayroot password.

On a system running 8.3 SP2 or later, do the following:

1. Enter the following command:
   /usr/tideway/bin/tw_custom_dvd_config
   This creates the database location and confirms that post-kickstart configuration has been completed.
2. You are prompted for the top-level location of the database (DATASTORE_ROOT). The default is /usr/tideway on a single disk installation. For a twin disk installation, enter the mount point of your second disk. If the location does not exist it is created with the correct permissions.
   • If the location exists and contains files or directories the script displays a warning and requests confirmation whether to continue or not.
   • If the location exists and is not writeable by the tideway user the script requests confirmation whether to change permissions or not.
3. You are asked whether networking has been configured. Confirm that it has.
4. 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.

On a system running any version before 8.3 SP2, do the following:

1. 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
2. Enter the following command:
   su - tideway -c /usr/tideway/bin/tw_custom_dvd_config
   This creates the database.
3. 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.
4. You are asked whether networking has been configured. Confirm that it has.
5. 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.