Altitude Software provides support to Altitude Xperience applications running on VMware, including VMware vSphere and VMware ESXi, and excluding VMware Player.

Altitude Customer Care may advise customers to consider the deployment of the applications in a physical environment, to address eventual performance issues.

Altitude Xperience does not support:

• The use, configuration, or performance optimization of VMware components.
• Live migration or back-up of running virtual machines.
• Snapshots.
• VMware vMotion.
• VMware time sync with guest host.
• VMware DRS.
• VMware Fault Tolerance.

Altitude Xperience does not recommend hyperthreading. If you suspect that the virtualization layer is the root cause of an incident, the customer will be required to contact the appropriate VMware support provider to resolve the VMware issue.

Guidelines on improving latency on virtualized environments

Altitude suggests some measures to decrease latency on virtualized environments using VMware ESXi:

Host hardware that complies with:

1. Hardware-Assisted CPU Virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V™);
2. Hardware-Assisted MMU Virtualization (Intel EPT and AMD RVI);
3. Hardware-Assisted I/O MMU Virtualization (VT-d and AMD-Vi);
4. Use server-class network adapter cards supporting most offload features: checksum offload, TCP segmentation offload (TSO), ability to handle high-memory DMA (that is, 64-bit DMA addresses), ability to handle multiple Scatter Gather elements per Tx frame, jumbo frames (JF), large receive offload (LRO) and when using VXLAN, the NICs should support offload of encapsulated packets. Also make sure the NICs are installed in slots with enough bandwidth to support their maximum throughput;
5. Use SR-IOV or DirectPath IO for latency sensitive traffic.Virtual network adapters such as VMXNET3 and E1000 incur Virtualization overhead on the order of a few microseconds per packet. When this overhead is not desirable, and certain core virtualization features are not needed, you might obtain lower network latency by providing the virtual machine direct access to the network device using DirectPath I/O or SR-IOV (“Single Root I/O Virtualization”). In either case, we also recommend tuning the interrupt rate for the device in the guest. The VMXNET3 virtual network adapter is the best choice if direct device access is unavailable or undesirable.

In the host BIOS, ensure that:

1. All processor sockets and cores are enabled;
2. Turbo boost is enabled for the processors that support it;
3. Enable all hardware virtualization features;
4. Disable any devices you’ll not be using;
5. Set power management to OS controlled;
6. If available, disable C1E halt state;
7. Disable all other C-states;

In the VMware ESXi host, ensure that the host power policy is set to maximum performance.

In the guest virtual machine, ensure that, in case direct network device access is unavailable, use the VMXNET3 virtual network adapter and disable virtual network interrupt coalescing.

Supported Altitude Xperience applications

All Altitude Xperience applications can run on VMware ESXi 5 and above, with the following exceptions:

• Automated Agents with ISDN architecture.
• Altitude Communication Server with ISDN architecture.
• vBox WebRTC with Altitude Enterprise Recording.

In addition:

• Ensure CPU performance setting in BIOS and Windows Server are set to High Performance and not to Power Optimization.
• The License Manager is supported only with the license key attached to an USBanywhere device.
• Altitude vBox 5/5.1 All-In-One servers with a maximum of 80 extensions and no Digium cards are supported on VMware when using the provided Altitude vBox 5/5.1 OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) extension file.
• Virtualization products cause resource utilization overhead. Please, contact Sales Support for assistance in finding the best hardware configuration for your scenario.
• Virtual machines running applications cannot share server resources (CPU, RAM, hard-disk and network adapters) with other virtual machines.
• VMware Resource Allocation Reservation must be configured reserving for each virtual machine ALL the CPU and RAM configured on the virtual machine.
• Due to a VMware ESXi behavior, if an Altitude vBox 5/5.1 virtual machine, momentarily, does not need all the resources allocated to it, another virtual machine might use these free resources and an OS derived delay will be introduced when the Altitude vBox 5/5.1 virtual machine requires access to the totality of the allocated resources.
• Technical support may advise customers to consider the deployment of the applications in a physical environment, to address eventual performance issues.

Requisites for installing Altitude Xperience applications in VMware

The following list displays the requisites for installing each Altitude Xperience application in VMware:

License Server

• Parallel port configured in the virtual machine.
• Sentinel 7.6.0, provided at the start of the installation wizard.

Altitude uCI Server

• VMware Tools have to be installed.
  • Note: The Altitude uCI Server limits the number of logged agents to 20, if:
    • Hardware and software requirements are not met.
    • The virtual machine does not run in a VMware ESXi environment.