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The objective of this document is to share the performance of IntelliMAX in a redundant environment
based on VMware ESX 4.0. IntelliMAX¶s data, which includes VTQs (from PLCs) and internal alarms,
has to be communicated across the redundant servers in case the first host goes down. Ideally, this
should occur with zero data loss. Our setup has shown very minor glitches of 2-3 seconds during such
failover operations on normal load.





Our architecture consists of the following machines:
›Y 2 Dell R710 servers running VMware ESX 4.0
›Y 3 Dell Optiplex machines (1 ± vCentre server, 1 ± DNS + Active Directory, 1 SAN Node
running Stormwind software iSCSI)
›Y 1 Pentium 4 machine for running vSphere and IntelliMAX clients
The hierarchy may be visualized as:
D   
›Y Virtual machines running on a redundant setup can only be configured with a single CPU core
›Y Maximum memory that can be allocated to the virtual machine in this setup is roughly 3.5 GB
›Y Devices sending data to IntelliMAX: 17
›Y Connected clients: 4
›Y Active Historian Log groups: 3
›Y Expected burst per historian log group/second: 1000
›Y Expected alarms per second: 1480


Performance of the virtual machine on normal projects (Uch, simple random tags) was very smooth with
glitches of only max 2-3 seconds. However, when the MMLT test project is started with a high data
influx from connected devices, it was noticed that CPU usage of the virtual machine would shoot up to
100%. Glitches of up to 6-7 seconds were also observed in historian logs during failover operations.


  
During the VMware training session, the consultant pointed out that Fault Tolerance is best configured
on a separate network with 10 Gbps connectivity. Currently, our FT links consist of the two ESX servers
cross-connected using 1Gbps NICs. Additionally, the network for the iSCSI node (aka SAN node)
should be established using managed Cisco switches.