Requirements For Installing Actifio Sky Appliance

Sizing Requirements

You can install a Sky Appliance in the existing Oracle Cloud VMware Solution infrastructure. Ensure that the vSphere host has enough memory and CPU cores reserved to accommodate your Actifio model.

The size of the appliance is determined by the size of the production data that’s being protected. The following table provides a guide for selecting the appropriate configuration.

Size	Recommended Capacity	CPU Cores (Unencrypted/Encrypted)	RAM (BG)
Small	60 TB	4/6	16
Medium	120 TB	6/8	32
Large	200 TB	8/10	48

vSphere Server Requirements

At a high level, Actifio recommends the following settings:

Set the vSphere host power management to Off (that is, the active policy is set to High Performance). By default, power management on all ESXi hosts in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is set to High Performance.
Use Network Time Protocol (NTP) for vSphere. Do not use the VMware Tools periodic time synchronization.

Storage Requirements

The Sky Appliance uses three storage pools: a Primary Pool, a Snapshot Pool, and a Dedup Pool. To size a Sky Appliance, you must consider the amount of data to be captured, as well as its type, change rate, growth, and how long to retain it. These variables and others are considered in the solution sizing tool provided by Actifio.

This tool recommends how to allocate space for at least three disks:

Primary Pool: One 200-GB, thick-provision-eager-zeroed disk.
Snapshot Pool: Holds the snapshots (full copies) to retain, plus enough space for future growth. A minimum of 10 GB is required. You can add more disks in vSphere to accommodate growth. The Snapshot Pool requires a dedicated SCSI controller, set to VMware Paravirtual. You can attach File Storage as an NFS datastore for this purpose.
Dedup Pool: Holds the deduplicated data to retain, plus enough space for future growth. A minimum of 100 GB is required. You can add more disks in vSphere to accommodate growth. The Dedup Pool requires its own SCSI controller, set to VMware Paravirtual. You can attach File Storage as an NFS datastore for this purpose.
OnVault Pool: OnVault Pools are optional. There are no minimum capacity requirements for this pool.

Note:

Don’t resize disks for Snapshot and Dedup Pools. If you need more storage, add disks instead.

Networking Requirements

Sky Appliances require the following network settings:

Static IP addresses: You must provide static IP addresses for all network interface cards (NICs) on Sky Appliances. For instructions on creating static IPs in the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution environment, see “Create External Access IP Addresses” in the next section.
Adding NICs: By default, the Sky Appliance comes with a single NIC.

Network Protocol Support

Actifio Sky on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution currently supports storage presentation (as part of backup, recovery, and mount operations) over NFS. If you have a network connection from both the Sky Appliance and the vSphere host that the VM resides on, all backups and mounts using NFS proceed normally. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can use File Storage as an NFS datastore in vSphere.

Note:

An NFS datastore in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is supported only as a backup target. Using NFS datastore in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution for production workload is unsupported by Oracle and VMware.