Identity Manager Database Virtualization Recommendations (4318975)

Identity Manager Database Virtualization Recommendations

Virtualization reduces the management complexity in large environments and allows a higher capacity usage.  Additionally, virtual servers can provide a high level of availability without the need for clustering or SAN failover setups. This raises interest in also virtualizing database servers.

Running Identity Manager in a virtual environment is highly likely to lead to performance issues.

Identity Manager is a database centered software that displays the characteristics of an OLTP system, but also holds large amounts of data for reporting and analysis. Depending on the configuration, level of customization and usage, the database server may experience high loads.

Database servers have high memory and storage I/O requirements. Virtualization adds overhead to every I/O operation which may result in unexpected performance problems.

Database servers break queries out across multiple CPUs and expect CPUs to perform identical. Virtualization adds overhead to CPU scheduling, which may result in unexpected performance problems and loss of responsivity.

For the installation of the Identity Manager database, the Oracle and Microsoft Database Servers need to be installed on a physical server.

Note: An exception to this recommendation can be made for small deployments as detailed in the scenario below.

Please be aware that conforming to the system requirements below in itself cannot guarantee sufficient performance. Tuning considerations common to all database servers still apply. For more information please contact your database and virtualization vendor.

For system requirements, please refer to the Release Notes for the version of  Identity Manager you are using:

Identity Manager - Technical Documentation

Small Environment:

• 1000 employees
• 3 main target systems (AD, Exchange, LDAP, one generic)
• 10 defined business roles
• 100 compliance rules
• Standard reports only
• Less than 10 approval workflows
• Standard customization of the provisioning workflows
• Web front end: Standard customizing
• Shop items: less than 500

System requirements:

• 4 virtual processors
• 10 GB RAM (12 GB when also running a job server)

Additional Details:

• Please refer to Quest Support Policy on Virtualization in the Global Support Guide.