Create and Deploy on VMware®

You can deploy Oracle Communications Session Delivery products on ESXI hypervisors running VMware 6. For general deployment tasks, from hardware installation to VM resource management, see the VMware documentation.

Before You Begin:

• Confirm that the VMware version 6 Hypervisor is installed on an appropriate network server.
• Confirm that the server has 40GB of space for this installation.

Note:

The following procedure describes a typical deployment. The system may display different screens, depending on the deployment.

Detail on Oracle Communications Session Delivery product-specific setup steps is shown below.

1. From the VMWare ESXi Host page, click Create/Register VM.
2. On the Select Creation Type screen, select Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA file and click Next.
3. On the Select OVF and VMDK Files screen:
   1. Enter a name for the virtual machine.
   2. Browse to a target .ova file.
   3. Click Next.
4. On the Select Storage screen, click Next.
5. On the License Agreements screen, click I agree and click Next.
6. On the Deployment Options screen:
   1. Map the networks used in this template to networks in your inventory.
      The SBC enumerates and binds network interfaces in the order presented by the hypervisor to the virtual machine. If 3 or less interfaces are presented, the bind order is wancom0, s0p0, s1p0. If more than 3 interfaces are presented, the bind order is:

      1. wancom0
      2. wancom1
      3. wancom2
      4. spare
      5. s0p0
      6. s1p0
      7. s0p1
      8. s1p1

      If your hypervisor randomly allocates addresses for network interfaces, the interface order at the hypervisor does not necessarily match that of the SBC. You can use the interface-mapping show command to determine the MAC address to interface order, and if necessary, adjust it using the interface-mapping swap command.

      By default, all interfaces use the recommended VmxNet3 driver.

   2. For Disk provisioning, select Thin or Thick.
   3. Leave the box checked to power on automatically.
   4. Click Next.
7. On the Additional Settings screen:
   1. Click Bootloader parameters to expand the settings.
   2. Enter the desired boot parameters.

      Note:

      With S-CZ8.4.0p3 or later, you can enter the SHA1 hash of the password for each account (user, admin, and li-admin) into its respective field.
   3. Click Next.
8. On the Ready to Complete screen, review the selections, make edits if necessary, and click Finish.

Optimize for VMware

Change these VMware settings to optimize your SBC for performance.

Set VM Compatibility

If you upgrade your hypervisor, you need to manually upgrade the VM compatibility of each previously deployed SBC to match the version of your host.

1. Shutdown the VM.
2. Select Actions, and then Upgrade VM Compatibility.
3. Select the ESXi version that matches the version of the host.
4. Click Upgrade.

CPU Pinning

By specifying the CPU affinity settings for each VM, you create VM-to-processor placement constraints. Note that CPU affinity is different than VM-to-VM or VM-to-Host affinity rules.

Note:

CPU pinning does not work where vMotion determines VM placement in VMware clusters.

1. Determine the NUMA node assicated with the NIC card used for media traffic.

   esxcfg-info -w

2. Select Settings, and then CPU.
3. Set Cores per Socket to the number of CPUs to assign to the VM.
4. Set Reservation to the number of CPUs multiplied by the clock speed.

   For example, if the clock speed is 2095 MHz and 8 CPUs are assigned to the VM, reserve 16760 MHz.

   Note:

   Use show platform cpu on your SBC to display the CPU clock speed.
5. If your hardware supports IOMMU, set IOMMU to Expose IOMMU to the guest OS.
6. Under Sheduling Affinity, enter the physical CPU numbers assiciated with the identified NUMA node as comma-seperated numbers.
   • On a hyperthreaded host, use the even numbered CPUs for your SBC VM.
   • Make sure the assigned core numbers, including sibling cores, are not used by other VMs.

     You can do this by explicitly assigning the remaining CPUs to other VMs.

   For example, if you have 96 available CPUs available, your entry might look like this:

   80,82,84,86,88,90,92,94

Memory Pinning

Memory pinning reservations specify the guaranteed minimum allocation for a VM.

1. Select Settings, and then Memory.
2. Set Reservations to the maximum allocated amount.

   By default the system reserves only 25% of the allocated amount.

Virtual NIC Settings

By default, all interfaces use the recommended VmxNet3 driver.

Virtual NIC Settings for Media Interfaces

ESXi uses one transmit thread regardless of the number of vNICs associated with a VM. To achieve significant parallelism for high I/O workloads, you can configure a VM to use one transmit thread per vNIC. Enabling this increases network throughput at the cost of higher CPU usage.

1. Select your VM, right-click, and then select Settings, and then VM Options, and then Advanced.
2. Select Edit configuration and then Add parameter.
3. Add a parameter (or edit an existing parameter) called ethernetX.ctxPerDev (where the capital X is the number of the vNIC) and set its value to 1.

   For example, if vNICs 4 and 5 are used as media ports, add the parameters ethernet4.ctxPerDev and ethernet5.ctxPerDev and set each value to 1.

4. Click Save.

Latency Sensitivity

For VMs in paravirtualized mode, the Latency Sensitivity parameter should be set to Normal.

Managing Snapshots

You can use snapshots to preserve the state and data of your SBC prior to upgrading. This allows you to revert back to the previous condition if the upgrade encounters a problem. See VMware's documentation for Using Snapshots to Manage Virtual Machines