This article applies to:

• WebMarshal
• VMWare and Hyper-V environments

Question:

• What are the system and resource requirements for WebMarshal in a virtualized environment?

Information:

WebMarshal is a real-time application.

Because WebMarshal is expected to process user web requests in real time, it is essential to provide adequate resources to the WebMarshal servers.

Adequate resourcing is even more important in virtualized environments. 

Based on experience the WebMarshal engineering team recommends the following:

• A Virtual Machine used to install WebMarshal should be configured to exceed the system requirements stated in the User Guide.
  • Many sources suggest you should allow 10% additional resources for virtualization overhead. 
• If you host more than one virtual machine on a server, the host system must have enough resources to supply separate physical resources (particularly memory and disk) to EACH virtual machine.
• WebMarshal working directories (such as unpacking and proxy cache) must reside on a separate dedicated physical disk drive of the host server.
  • Use of networked storage is not recommended due to inadequate disk IO performance. 
• To ensure adequate disk performance, where you have created more than one virtual disk, you may require more than one physical disk drive. WebMarshal unpacking and SQL database operations are disk intensive.

In short a virtualized installation of WebMarshal requires more resource than installation on a physical server.

An under-resourced system will not meet your performance expectation.

Notes:

As with any installation, you can help product performance by minimizing the traffic scanned. See Trustwave Knowledge Base article 14916.

For more information about support for WebMarshal in virtualized environments, see Trustwave Knowledge Base article Q11828.