Tài liệu ActuateOne on VMware® vSphere™ 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5 docx

ActuateOne
on VMware
®
vSphere™ 5.0 and vCloud
Director 1.5
Revision 1.1
March 2012
DEPLOYMENT AND TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS GUIDE




Actuate BIRT
on VMware
®
vSphere 5.0 (Draft 1.1)
November 2011
D E P L O Y M E N T A N D T E C H N I C A L C O N S I D E R A T I ONS G U I D E

D E P L OY MEN T A ND T E CHN I CAL C O NSI DERATI ONS G U I DE II
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Table of Contents
Revision Summary 3
Introduction 4
VMware and ActuateOne Overview 5

ActuateOne Overview 5
VMware vSphere 6
vCloud Director 7
vFabric Data Director 8
ActuateOne Architecture and Deployment Strategy 10
Testing Process and Results 12
Testing Methodology and Overview 12
Hardware and System Host Configuration 12
Installed Software 13
Virtual Machine Configuration 13
Workload Used 13
Results Observed 13
ActuateOne Scalability Test: 16
Scalability Testing Process and Results 16
Hardware and System Host Configuration 17
Workload Used 17
Results Observed 18
Deployment Best Practices 22
Licensing 23
Technical Support 24
Conclusions 25
Acknowledgements 26
Resources 27

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 3
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Revision Summary

This version of documents includes the follow ing additional topics:

ActuateOne horizontal scalability testing performed using vCloud Director 1.5 and vSphere 5.0

VMw are vFabric Data Director w as used to provision vPostgres Database and horizontal scalability
tests w ere executed using both Postgres and vPostgres database




D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 4
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Introduction
This document provides direction for those interested in running ActuateOne on VMw are® vSphere™5.0
and VMware vCloud Director 1.5. It provides basic guidance on the architecture of ActuateOne, and the
value of utilizing the VMw are platform for private cloud deployment of ActuateOne behind a corporate
firew all. This paper covers the results of recent testing done jointly by VMware and Actuate, and also
describes performance and functionality of ActuateOne on VMw are virtual infrastructure. In addition, it also
outlines some best practices in utilizing the tw o product sets together for your private cloud deployment of
ActuateOne.


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 5
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

VMware and ActuateOne Overview
The ActuateOne Platform w ith VMw are vSphere gives enterprises the ability to deploy their Business
Intelligence (BI) applications in a unified cloud environment w ith built-in security and role-based access
control. Together, the joint solution delivers three unique capabilities to the enterprise:

An efficient and secure approach to using shared infrastructure for servicing highly frequent
requests

A standardized, portable, and extensible approach to enable w orkloads to be deployed w ithout
manual configuration and across multiple clouds

Agile access to shared infrastructure for provisioning w orkloads w hen in demand.
ActuateOne Overview
Recognizing the need for seamless, dynamic and accessible Business Information solutions, Actuate – the
co-founder and co-leader of the premier BIRT open source development project – presents ActuateOne.
This innovative suite of integrated BI products and services features a common architecture for development
and deployment that meets the dynamically changing needs of information consumers. ActuateOne enables
any organization to build and deploy mission critical Business Intelligence and rich information applications.
These applications can be built for any user, anyw here, w ith a variety of tools based on one user
experience, supported by one server and built w ith one design using BIRT. Using value-add design tools:

End users can modify their view s of data to suit their needs

Business users can develop their ow n data visualizations, based on templates created by IT and/or
developers

IT and developers can create templates and data visualizations that can be used by business and
end users
Users can customize the BIRT content received in any format, including rich visualizations and dashboards,
to meet their ow n needs.

Using value-added deployment options, depending on project size, requirements and budget, deployments
can be

Scaled to support any number of employees, customers or partners, using a pre-built platform

Set up and running in less than an hour

Cloud ready, providing clustering and elastic provisioning w ith support for a stateless image that
allow s administrators to make changes at runtime w ithout service interruptions.


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 6
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Figure 1: ActuateOne Suite

VMware vSphere
VMw are’s leading virtualization solutions based on our flagship product, VMware vSphere provides multiple
benefits to IT administrators and users. VMw are virtualization creates a layer of abstraction betw een the
resources required by an application and operating system, and the underlying hardw are that provides those
resources. A summary of the value of this abstraction layer includes the follow ing:

Consolidation: VMw are technology allow s multiple application servers to be consolidated onto one
physical server, w ith little or no decrease in overall performance.

Ease of Provisioning: VMw are virtualization encapsulates an application into an image that can be
duplicated or moved, greatly reducing the cost of application provisioning and deployment.


Manageability: Virtual machines may be moved from server to server w ith no dow ntime using VMw are®
VMotion™, w hich simplifies common operations like hardw are maintenance and reduces planned
dow ntime.

Availability: Unplanned dow ntime can be reduced and higher service levels can be provided to an
application. VMw are® High Availability (HA) ensures that in the case of an unplanned hardw are failure,
any affected virtual machines are restarted on another host in a VMw are cluster.









D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 7
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Figure 2: Applications in a Virtual Environment

vCloud Director
VMw are vCloud Director enables enterprises to build secure, multi-tenant private clouds by pooling
infrastructure resources into virtual datacenters. vCloud Director enables users to access these resources
through w eb based portals and programmatic interfaces as fully automated, catalog-based services. For
more information on vCloud Director, see the Resources section later in this paper.
For ActuateOne, vCloud Director provides the management capability for importing the BIRT application as
a virtual appliance also called a vApp. vCloud Director is also used to provision and de-provision the vApp in
a manner that is very consistent and repeatable, w hich significantly reduces ActuateOne set-up time and
simplifies deployment.
Additionally, ActuateOne deployment can be scaled by continually adding or removing iServer as a virtual
machine (also know n as - scaling unit) to a running vApp, w hich contains ActuateOne w orkload in a
consistent and secure manner.



D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 8
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Figure 3: VMware vCloud Director

vFabric Data Director
VMw are’s vFabric Data Director pow ers database-as-a-service for your cloud, thereby reducing the
database spraw l and drastically accelerating application development cycles w ith a self-service database
provisioning and operations platform. vFabric Data Director is an enterprise solution that extends the
benefits of VMw are’s leading virtualization platform to the database tier and lets administrators securely
automate and delegate routine tasks, including database provisioning, backup, and cloning.
The first database supported on Data Director is VMw are vFabric Postgres 9.0 (vPostgres), a new offering

from VMw are based on and fully compatible w ith PostgreSQL. vPostgres is a vSphere-optimized ACID and
ANSI-SQL relational database and is the first of a broad range of commercial and open source databases to
be supported by Data Director. These capabilities enable vFabric Data Director to offer the agility of public
cloud database services w ith enterprise-grade security, flexibility, control, and compliance.
Actuate bundles a PostgreSQL database in their standard distribution for evaluation and small business
deployments. It also supports other major databases such as Oracle, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL
Server. Instead of using this Postgres DB instance, w e used VMw are vFabric Data Director to provision a
vFabric Postgres 9.0 for our test. By doing this, there was an option to provision our Postgres DB instance
from existing Postgres DB templates, w hich define the scale of deployments from small, medium to large.
How ever, the focus of this test w as to primarily observe at the compatibility and performance aspects of how
vPostgres served as the backend database for Actuate iServer. The parameters like usability,
manageability, and overall cost savings vFabric vPostgres could pass onto our customers w ere not
discussed in this document. For more information on vFabric Data Director, you can visit the site
http://w w w.vmw are.com/products/application-platform/vfabric-data-director/overview .html


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DERA T I ONS G U I DE 9
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Figure 4: VMware vFabric Data Director






D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 10
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
ActuateOne Architecture and Deployment Strategy

Figure 5 illustrates a typical customer solution architecture deploying ActuateOne w ith multi-instance and
multi-tenancy in a physical environment.

Figure 5: ActuateOne Architecture Design in a Physical Environment



The architecture includes all components found in a real-w orld ActuateOne deployment, beyond the iServer:

Application Server Tier: The ActuateOne Information Console, running on an application server,
relays requests to the Actuate BIRT iServer.

iServer Tier: For BI content generation requests, the Actuate iServer retrieves data from a
database.

Encyclopedia Tier: For BI content view ing requests, the Actuate iServer retrieves the report
document from the iServer Encyclopedia and renders it in HTML. The Information Console then
presents the results to the end user on the Internet.

Storage Tier: SAN or shared disk arrays can be used to house the iServer Encyclopedia w ith 24x7
reliability.
If ActuateOne is deployed in a virtual environment using vCloud Director, the architecture remains the same.
The main difference is that the physical servers w ould be virtualized in a cloud environment. This offers
more agility and flexibility to ActuateOne w orkloads as they can be easily scaled out and scaled back on
demand. Figure 6illustrates the ActuateOne architecture in a virtual environment.

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 11
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Figure 6: ActuateOne Architecture Design in a Virtual Environment


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 12
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Testing Process and Results
To characterize the performance of ActuateOne on VMw are Infrastructure, performance tests w ere carried
out jointly by VMw are and Actuate. The configuration tested and the results are summarized below .
Testing Methodology and Overview
The primary testing objective w as to determine w hether ActuateOne BIRT iServer and Information Console
products could run more resiliently on VMware platform. ActuateOne w as deployed in a virtual environment,
and four tests w ere conducted to validate BI content generation and view ing during the vMotion, VMware
DRS and VMware HA features.

Hardware and System Host Configuration
The follow ing table describes the configuration of ESX host servers and storage in the test configurations.

Table 1: ESX Host Hardware

H ARDW AR E
C ONF I GU RATION
Server

One HP Proliant DL980 G7 server equipped w ith:

Intel® Xeon® X7560 @ 2.26 GHz

Sockets: 8

Number of Cores per socket: 8

Hyperthreading: Enabled

512 GB RAM

6 x 1GBPS NICs

2 x 10GBPS NICs


Tw o HP Proliant DL380 G7 servers equipped w ith:

Intel® Xeon® X5680 @ 3,332 GHz

Sockets: 2

Number of Cores per socket: 6

Hyperthreading : Enabled


98 GB RAM

6 x 1GBPS NICs

2 x 10GBPS NICs
Storage





HP P4600 iSCSI SAN

Storage RAID 10

Netw ork RAID 10





D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 13
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Installed Software
The follow ing table lists the softw are used in the Actuate solution.
Table 2: Installed Software

I N STALL ED SOFTWARE
VMw are

ESX 5.0

vCenter 5.0

vCloud Director 1.5

vShield 1.5

vFabric Data Director 1.5
Actuate

ActuateOne BIRT iServer 11 SP2

ActuateOne Information Console 11 SP2
Database

Postgres SQL 8.4

Virtual Machine Configuration
The follow ing table describes the configuration of virtual machines running on ESX host servers in the
Actuate test configurations.
Table 3: Virtual Machine Configuration
VIRTU AL MACH I NE
H ARDW AR E C ON F IGURATI ON
ActuateOne BIRT iServer

4 vCPUs


16 GB RAM
ActuateOne Information Console

2 vCPU

4GB RAM
PostgreSQL

2 vCPU

4GB RAM

Workload Used
The view ing load test simulated multiple users simultaneously logging in and conducting different types of
view ing requests on randomly selected pages of pre-generated BIRT designs. It is conducted w ith a
constant load of user view ing requests to the ActuateOne Information Console and BIRT iServer. All
systems w ere utilized w ith a steady operational w orkload pattern, w here each system stayed at around 50
percent CPU utilization. With the load test in effect, a VMw are feature (vMotion, DRS, or HA) w as activated
and given enough time to complete w ithin a predetermined length of time.
Results Observed
Test 1: Load Test With vMotion Activation
A 15-minute load test w as conducted w ith one ActuateOne BIRT iServer and one Information Console
instance. At the five-minute mark of the load test, vMotion w as activated to move the iServer VM to another
ESXi host. For both configurations, the average response time and throughput remained w ithin the expected
timeframe.


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 14
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Table 4: Test 1- Load Test With vMotion Activation
TIME PERIOD
ACTION
AVERAGE R ESPONSE TI ME
THR OU GHPUT
Minute 1-5
Load without vMotion
0.1 seconds
50 requests/sec
Minute 6-9
vMotion being activated
4.7 seconds
39 requests/sec
Minute 10-12
Load with vMotion
0.1 seconds
49 requests/sec


Figure 7: Test 1- Load Test With vMotion Activation



Test 2: Load Test With VMware DRS
A 30-minute load test w as conducted w ith tw o ActuateOne BIRT iServer and tw o Information Console
instances. At the 20-minute mark of the load test, the DRS feature w as activated. For both configurations,
the average response time and throughput remained w ithin the expected timeframe.

Table 5: Test 2 - Load Test With VMware DRS
TIME PERIOD
AC TION
AVERAGE R ESPONSE TI ME
THR OU GHPUT
Minute 1-17
Load without DRS
0.2 seconds
150 requests/sec
Minute 18-20
DRS being activated
7.7 seconds
75 requests/sec
Minute 21-30
Load with DRS
0.8 seconds
144 requests/sec


0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90

100
1 16 31 46 61 76 91 106 121 136 151 166
%Used
iServer CPU Utilization during vMotion
%Used

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 15
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Test 3: Load Test With VMware HA
A 15-minute load test w as conducted w ith tw o ActuateOne BIRT iServer and tw o Information Console
instances. Each iServer and Information Console pair ran on a different ESX host. At the five-minute mark of
the load test, one ESX host w as forcibly restarted to simulate a crash.

Table 6: Test 3- Load Test With VMware HA
TIME PERIOD
ACTION
AVERAGE R ESPONSE
TIME
THR OU GHPUT
Minute 1-5
Load without HA
0.2 seconds
150 requests/sec
Minute 6-10
HA being activated
8.7 seconds
42 requests/sec

Minute 11-15
Load with HA
0.2 seconds
150 requests/sec


Test 4: BIRT Content Generation with vMotion
The final test simulated BIRT content generation w ith and without the operation of vMotion. A long-running
generation job w as submitted and w as expected to finish in approximately 30 minutes. At the five-minute
mark, the iServer executing this job w as moved via vMotion. The job continued to run before, during, and
after vMotion w as activated. The w hole job finished successfully, w ithout any issues, in 30 minutes. The
generated BIRT document w as complete w ithout any issues.


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 16
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

ActuateOne Scalability Test:

The primary testing objective w as to determine w hether ActuateOne BIRT iServer and Information Console
products could scale vertically as w ell as horizontally on VMw are Virtual platform. ActuateOne w as deployed
in a VMw are vCloud Director environment, and tests w ere conducted to validate BI content view ing. The
hardw are used for the validation w as different than used in the previous tests.
The Workload used remains same as before as mentioned in Table 1. The Virtual Machine configurations
w ere changed for the vertical scalability tests but for the horizontal scalability tests, same configuration was
used.
We also validated the use of VMw are vFabric Data Director to provision and configure vPostgres Database

for ActuateOne BIRT application. Also, Scalability tests w ere performed to verify Actuate BIRT performance
w hile using vPostgres Database.
Scalability Testing Process and Results

The follow ing tests w ere executed to check the ActuateOne scalability on VMw are vSphere platform:

1. iServer horizontal scalability tests:

For the first test, ActuateOne application components w ere deployed to vCloud director catalog.
The iServer cluster w as configured using VMs mentioned in the table below . The number of
iServer VMs in the cluster w as increased to 2, 4, and 6 for different tests.

Table 7: Virtual Machine Configuration
VIRTU AL MACH I NE
H ARDW AR E C ON F IGURATI ON
ActuateOne BIRT iServer
 2 vCPUs
 16 GB RAM
ActuateOne Information Console
 2 vCPU
 4GB RAM
PostgreSQL
 2 vCPU
 4GB RAM

2. Factory Scalability Test:
VMw are recommends starting one Java factories per vCpu for the iServer VM. This test evaluates
the impact of starting more than 4 factories on a 4 vCPU iServer VM.

F ACTOR IES

MEMORY
2
4 GB
4
16 GB
8
16 GB
16
19 GB


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 17
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

3. vPostgres Test:
VMw are vFabric Data Director w as used to provision vPostgres Database for the Actuate Cluster.
The same horizontal scalability tests w ere executed using the new database. A midsize vPostgres
database w ith 2 vCPU and 4GB RAM w as deployed and the Database configurations for iServer
Cluster w ere done using the Data Director UI.


Hardware and System Host Configuration
The follow ing table describes the configuration of ESX host servers and storage in the test configurations.

Table 7: ESX Host Hardware
H ARDW AR E
C ONF I GU RATION

Server
 Two HP Proliant BL460 G7 servers equipped with:
 Intel® Xeon® X5650 @ 2.6 GHz
 Sockets: 2
 Number of Cores per socket: 6
 Hyperthreading : Enabled
 64 GB RAM
Storage




 EMC VNX
 Aggregate of 15 SSD disks
 RAID 10
 8 Gbps fibre connectivity
 15K RPM disks
 FC protocol
.

Workload Used
The view ing load test simulated multiple users simultaneously logging in and conducting different types of
view ing requests on randomly selected pages of pre-generated BIRT designs. It is conducted w ith a
constant load of user view ing requests to the ActuateOne Information Console and BIRT iServer. All
systems w ere utilized w ith a steady operational w orkload pattern, w here each system stayed at around 50
percent CPU utilization. With the load test in effect, a VMw are feature (vMotion, DRS, or HA) w as activated
and given enough time to complete w ithin a predetermined length of time.


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 18

ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Results Observed

Test1: iServer Scalability Test
30-minute load tests w ere conducted w ith various combinations of ActuateOne BIRT iServer and one
Information Console instance cluster. For all configurations, the average response time and throughput
remained w ithin the expected timeframe. The table below show s the Throughput for ActuateOne Application
and the resource utilization for all the virtual machines in the cluster.

Table 8: Test 1- iServer Scalability Test
N ODES
THR OU GHPUT
W I TH TH INK TI ME
N O TH IN K TI ME
1
61
65
2
124
125
4
231
235
6
332
336

Figure 8: iServer Scalability Test (With Think time)


Figure 9: iServer Scalability Test (No Think time)




D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 19
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
The iServer VM’s 2 vCPU w ere completely saturated during the test execution but there w ere no bottlenecks
and ready time observed. The table below show s the VM resource utilization for the entire duration of the
tests


Table 9: 6 Node iServer Cluster Esxtop resource Utilization




Ready
(Avg/Max) Avg Max Avg Max
iServer 99 100 0.19/4.45 3144.36 3522.56 5678.03 5232.58 0.03 2.93 0 0 0.01 0.64
iServer-03 80.83 100 0.29/0.515 2988.71 3440.64 2152.98 2054.69 0.76 4.5 0 0 0.63 2.97
iServer-04 83.55 100 0.22/0.56 3019.43 3399.68 2107.48 2025.37 1.38 143.87 0.06 3.35 0.09 2.24
iServer-05 83.52 100 0.28/0.92 3045.49 3522.56 2078.78 2017.47 0.44 2.74 0 0.8 0.19 0.98

iServer-06 83.67 100 0.3/0.625 3058.57 3440.64 1969.47 1996.88 71.04 613.32 0.43 9.22 2.64 14.17
iServer-07 85.21 100 0.29/0.775 3066.08 3399.68 2059.97 2000.5 79.17 621.7 0.57 9.72 2.41 12.2
ActuateNFS 1.49 1.705 0.08/0.325 19.34 81.92 5.1 1.72 0.29 4.5 0 0 0.44 18.57
I/O sec
Latency(ms)
Memory
Avg
Max
Recd
Txmitted
Avg
Max
Read
VM
CPU
Avg
Max
Write
Network
Disk
(%)
(mb)
Packets/sec

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 20
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Test 2: Factory Scalability Test

The view ing tests w ere run for a 4 vCpu iServer VM w ith different number of factories for different
configurations. Due to more number of factories per vCpu, the 8 and 16 factory tests did not scale properly
as expected. VMw are recommends starting one Java factory per vCPU for BIRT iServer VMs.

Table 10: Test 2: Factory Scalability Test
F ACTOR IES
THR OU GHPUT
2
67
4
124
8
168
16
161



Test3: vPostgres Test:

vPostgres performed w ell w ith iServer and compared to Postgres, there w as some improvement in the
throughput for larger deployments. For the horizontal scalability tests (Test1), the Postgres DB w as installed
w ithin the iServer1. As VMw are vFabric Data Director provisioned another VM for vPostgres, the
performance for 4 and 8 node tests w as better w hile using vPostgres DB.
Table 11: Test 2: Factory Scalability Test


N ODES

THR OU GHPUT

VPOSTGRES
POSTGR ES
1
65
65
2
125
125
4
246
231
8
470
440



D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 21
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Figure 10: Factory Scalability Test with vPostgres

Table 12: 8Node iServer Cluster with vPostgres Esxtop resource Utilization

Ready
(Avg/Max) Avg Max Avg Max
iServer-vPost 90.84 100 0.29/0.88 3113.87 3522.56 2282.99 2229.29 0.74 3.33 0 0.77 0.84 22.66
iServer 92.29 100 0.32/1.16 3150.96 3604.48 2148.98 2204.66 0.42 3.33 0 0 0.17 4.79
iServer-02 91.8 100 0.44/7.26 3137.42 3522.56 2082.23 2123.45 0.73 5.62 0 0.71 0.71 7.43
iServer-03 92.57 100 0.15/0.85 3178.61 3686.4 2254.66 2205.62 0.7 1 3.91 0 0.83 0 .8 28 .89
iServer-04 81.59 100 0.33/1.17 3052.54 3481.6 2136.24 2077.05 0. 74 4.42 0 0.86 0. 8 22.5
iServer-05 87.6 100 0.11/0.585 3106.13 3604.48 2290.85 2243.64 111.9 1745.8 1.24 73.3 3.04 18.04
iServer-06 93.28 100 0.15/0.46 3155.06 3645.44 2219.99 2185.87 100.5 882.86 0.99 8.29 2.81 26.98
iServer-07 79.95 100 0.42/5.78 3023.99 3440.64 2145.81 2099.3 105.2 736.73 0.93 11.9 3.1 18.57
Avg
Max
Read
Write
Avg
Max
Avg
Max
Recd
Txmitted
VM
CPU
Memory
Network
Disk
(%)
(mb)
Packets/sec

I/O sec
Latency(ms)

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 22
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Deployment Best Practices
Actuate and VMw are relentlessly w orked closely together to determine how IT data centers can best meet
service requirements w hen deploying ActuateOne in VMw are virtualized environments. Results from the
testing described earlier in this paper show s that running ActuateOne on VMware virtual machines can
provide an effective production-ready platform. With added benefits such as management and
administrative flexibility, strong isolation and higher availability, VMw are platform can serve as an ideal
platform for ActuateOne Server consolidation.
Specific recommendations include:


Carefully design storage configurations and evaluate external storage choices, RAID levels, and latency
of IO operations.

High spindle count on LUNs to ensure I/O capacity available.

Use Thick Eager Zeroed disks for better I/O performance.

Consider Nehalems or Westmeres w ith EPT for maximum performance.


Consider using server-class netw ork interface cards (NICs) for the best performance and configure

paravirtualized vmxnet3 adapters for better netw ork throughput.


Disconnect or disable unused or unnecessary physical hardw are devices, such as


o COM ports
o LPT ports
o USB controllers
o Floppy drives
o Optical drives (that is, CD or DVD drives)

Disconnecting or disabling these devices w ill help free up interrupt resources, because traditionally some
devices such as USB controllers operate using a polling scheme that consumes extra CPU resources.
Lastly, some PCI devices reserve blocks of memory, making that memory unavailable to ESX.


Install VMw are tools on the virtual machines. The VMw are Tools package provides support required for
shared folders and for drag and drop operations. Other tools in the package support synchronization of
time in the guest operating system w ith time on the host, automatic grabbing and releasing of the mouse
cursor, copy and paste operation betw een guest and host, and improved mouse performance in some
guest operating systems

Use VMw are vMotion w ith VMw are DRS to balance the load.

Scale out versus scale up: Determine w hat components of the architecture w ork well w ith more than one
virtual machine, and how large each virtual machine should be.

Adding capacity: Determine how you could extend the configuration tested by adding more virtual
machines or increasing the size of virtual machines to allow a higher user count or larger batch jobs to

be run.

Availability: Plan use of VMw are HA and VMw are FT as w ell as other availability solutions (such as other
clustering technologies). Consider use of other disaster recovery options such as VMw are’s Site
Recovery Manager (SRM).

For better performance, ensure that the vCloud Organization vDC is configured to Thick Provision the
vApps w hile deploying from the Catalog.

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 23
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Licensing
Customers w ho w ant to run multiple instances of the Actuate softw are using VMw are based virtual
machines, can license w ith Per Instance Licensing (the default), Multi-Instance Licensing, or Work Unit
Licensing.
Actuate Multi-Instance licensing allow s customers to deploy an unlimited number of instances of the
ActuateOne softw are on the licensed CPU Cores. Multi-Instance licensing is a cost effective option when
multiple instances of the softw are are being used in a virtualized environment supporting multiple
applications and/or large numbers of users.
ActuateOne Work Unit licensing model offers flexibility for multi-core, server farm and cloud environments. It
enables organizations to effectively plan for the BIRT capacity required, w ith granular licensing options
based upon partial CPU usage.
Work Unit licensing ensures that customers can enjoy "pay as you grow " agility, know ing that Actuate
maintains a vested interest in the success of application development. Furthermore, the Work Unit licensing
model facilitates iterative, spontaneous application development and test cycles, since it enables IT
departments to conveniently budget and plan w hile responding efficiently to end user requirements.

D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 24
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Technical Support
Actuate support website:http://w ww.actuate.com/support/


D E P L OY MENT AND T E C HN I CAL CO N SI DER A TI ONS G U I DE 25
ActuateOne on VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Conclusions
Overall, testing results show that running ActuateOne on VMware Infrastructure performs w ell. Furthermore,
it has the potential to reduce cost, increase service levels, and simplify the manageability of the application.
The iServer Application can be easily deployed and configured for vCloud environment and due to its
scalable architecture, can provide additional CPU/Memory resources on demand. VMware recommends one
iServer Java factory on one vCPU for best performance.
Based on the testing, AcutateOne could scale linearly for the VMw are Virtual configuration documented in
this guide. Our test setup time w as also significantly reduced due to effortless rapid provisioning of
vPostgres database enabled by VMw are vFabric Data Director.