Virtualization of the Root Management Server (RMS)

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The traditional approach to virtualization for a Management Group is simple, don't do it. Soon there was an exception for the secondary management servers, including gateway servers as well as the web consoles. Performance was fine as long as the RMS and the Primary Database servers were physical. As for reporting, it was often not addressed since its performance does not impact the the core functionality of the management group. I've has a few recent experiences with OpsMgr 2007 and Hyper-V and wanted to share them with you.

Just a quick disclaimer, this is not officially supported and individual experiences will vary :-)

I have recently provisioned an entire management group with every component virtualized on Windows Server 2008 64-bit, including the RMS. All guest operating systems were hosted with Hyper-V, not VMWare. The two components not virtualized were the primary database (OperationsManager) and the data warehouse (OperationsManagerDW) which has SQL Reporting Services installed so OpsMgr Reporting resided on a physical platform too. Performance, surprisingly, is excellent. Now the specifics:

  1. The primary database was configured according to all best practices: multiple disk subsystems, fast disk, no overlapping I/O channels. 16GB of RAM etc. It was fast, it was bad and it was tuned.
  2. The data warehouse was also configured according to all best practices. It was built for capacity not performance. To mitigate possible performance issues with report generation, reports are scheduled for batch processing and delivered via e-mail and are also published to MOSS. Only a select few have full access to generate reports adhoc and at will. 
  3. The secondary management servers and the gateway server were virtualized, each with 2GB of RAM. Given these components are not major resource bottlenecks nor are they memory or processor intensive they have always been ideal candidates for virtualization.
  4. The web console was hosted also on a virtualized server, configured the same as the secondary management servers except with IIS installed.
  5. The RMS was virtualized with 4GB of RAM. The key is the disk subsystem which hosts the persistent disk storage was on a dedicated disk subsystem. 15K RPM disks configured in a hardware mirror. Now the last crucial piece is this management group leverages User Roles extensively! (Shameless Pug: Improving Console Performance with Fast Disks & User Roles (TR7 Chalk Talk))

This is a small environment, 500 agents with a full compliment of MPS. A full time dedicated OpsMgr administrator responsible for the Management Group and a dozen SMEs who have access to both the Operations Console and Web Console but with surgical views delivered through User Roles.