If you are considering deploying LiveCycle ES on VMWare ESX Server, your VMware Infrastructure people would want to know the basic provisioning details such as memory, storage and the number of CPUs. Based on testing we did with ESX Server 3.5 on an HP Proliant DL385 G2, here are the basic configuration details for a Windows guest OS VM with LiveCycle ES 8.0.1 SP2 on JBoss 4.0.3 SP1 and MySQL 5.0:
- two vCPUs with about 3.00 GHz clock speed
- 3 GB of RAM
- 15 GB of storage
Once built, this VM can be easily cloned. Given the fact that LiveCycle installs can be quite challenging, this clonability is very attractive.
However, IBM WebSphere does not handle cloning well. Oracle 10g requires that the Net Configuration Assistant be re-run. When cloning a VM, the clone will have to have its machine name and IP address change. BEA WebLogic, JBoss and MySQL seem to handle cloning well.
Also, the vNIC would have to be uninstalled and re-installed so that it will have a different object GUID from its clone peers. This is very important if you plan to deploy several of these LiveCycle VM clones in a Windows NLB load-balanced server farm that is not clustered. This particular topology is very useful for LiveCycle PDF Generator while using its ConvertToPDF function. This function is single-threaded when converting Microsoft Office native documents to PDF. So a farm of non-clustered VMs is much more appropriate.
Leave a comment