VidyoGateway VE requirements

You can run multiple Virtual Edition Vidyo servers (of any combination) on the same physical host when using VidyoGateway version 3.2 and later. Virtual Edition Vidyo servers may be run on hardware that is also running non-Vidyo virtual machines.

If you have an existing Virtual Edition software deployment, you can upgrade to newer software releases using the same hardware and virtual machine configurations. However, to be supported under the guidelines (such as sharing physical hosts with multiple virtual machines), your virtual machines must adhere to the virtual machine configurations listed in this section.

The guidelines provided here apply to VMware ESXi 5.0 and later. In the future, as additional virtualization platforms are tested, Vidyo will provide updated guidelines.

Based on our testing, the following recommendations should be considered when planning a virtual infrastructure:

  • Requires VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor software version 5.0 or later; version 5.5 or later recommended.
  • Must be compliant with the VMware qualified hardware list at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php
  • Requires Intel-based servers with a minimum Xeon 56xx Series at 2.0 GHz or faster, supporting Intel Westmere and newer architectures, with AES-NI and hyper-threading enabled. Xeon E5 family with Sandy Bridge architecture or newer are recommended.
  • At least 1Gbps vNICs.
  • The BIOS settings of the host machine must be set for maximum performance, including both CPU and memory settings.
  • The BIOS settings must enable the Hyperthreading, Virtualization Technology (VT), and Extended Page Tables (EPT) options on all ESX hosts.
  • The memory must be the highest rated speed specified by the host CPU, and all memory lanes of the CPUs must be populated with identical size and speed DIMMS.
  • For 4+ socket systems, set your CPU affinity to two adjacent packages to ensure that transcoding occurs on memory at most one node away.
  • For large memory configurations (64 GB+), ensure that memory access is coalesced from multiple memory channels, e.g., by enabling bank interleaving in the BIOS.
  • When running multiple virtual Vidyo servers:
  • Maintain 15% of the physical hardware CPU capacity as unreserved when deploying multiple virtual machines on a physical host.
  • When deploying multiple VidyoRouters on the same physical host, ensure that you have sufficient network bandwidth. The physical host should have 1 Gbps Ethernet per 100-port VidyoRouter.
  • The physical host must use CPUs with at least 2.0 GHz in all cases, and in some cases higher CPU speeds are required (see the CPU resource reservation guidelines in VidyoGateway VM provisioning requirements).
  • Do not co-locate high availability pairs on the same physical host.