Kofax Communication Server 9.1 - Manual (Page 24)

Environment Guide Version 3.00.04
24 © Copyright Kofax, Inc. All information is subject to change without notice.
There are many professional tools available today to help customers to collect performance and
workload characteristics of the applications to be virtualized. For example, VMware offers its Capacity
Planner service through their partners to help customers understand their virtualization opportunities.
The Capacity Planner‟s performance data collector runs on local machine on the customer site and it
sends the collected data to VMware‟s data warehouse for aggregation, analysis, and comparison with
other systems. After the data collection has been finished, VMware recommends the most effective
virtualization approach.
2. Deployment
Applications that had been chosen as suitable for virtualization are being migrated to the ESX server
3. Operation
Run virtualized applications on the ESX host, monitor the overall ESX host resources utilization with an
appropriate to ol (e.g., VMware Virtual Server, Vizioncore‟s EsxCharter) in order to see whether the
machine is not being totally over-utilized. On the other hand, collect the end user experience
concerning response times of the virtualized servers, etc. If the performance seems to degrade at
particular periods during a day, more resources that appear to be a bottleneck due to overall
performance data must be added (e.g., physical network cards or more CPUs). Furthermore,
applications that peak at the same periods of time should be split to different ESX servers to make the
virtualization more effective.
5.2 Virtualization Planning
5.2.1 Application Categorization
There are two main application categories of the KCS platform family:
1. Real-time
The applications providing any line connectivity (Fax via LS1, TC/FoIP, Voice lines) are being
considered real-time due to the real-time characteristics of the fax and voice line transmission: The
application must handle the line transmission/reception always in time, and any resource lack may lead
to data loss, fax interruption, etc.
Applications falling into this category are: TCOSS, TC/FoIP and all applications of the Voice Server
family – TC/VoiceAccess, VoiceLink2, VoiceXML.
This is why the virtualization of these applications is the most problematic. The only way to prevent line
transmission problems or even data loss is to grant particular resources on the ESX server for them.
Therefore, KCS specifies minimum resource requirements and offers methods to verify their fulfillment
during the operation.
2. Non-real time
Any other of the accompanying applications (TC/Web, TC/Report, IPPrinter, …) are not dealing with
real-time data, therefore, the performance degradation of their VM does not have such a critical impact
on their operation. If, for example, the VM with the IPPrinter does not receive enough resources
(because they are required for other VMs), the throughput of the IPPrinter would decrease, it would
simply print fewer fax pages in a given period of time, but no data loss or interruption would occur.