CA Support Statement for Running CA Infrastructure Management Products in Virtualization and SAN Environments

Copyright © 2013 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

This Support Statement applies to the following CA Infrastructure Management (CA IM) products:

CA Infrastructure Management

CA Infrastructure Performance

CA Infrastructure Insight

CA Performance Management

CA Spectrum

CA eHealth

CA Trap Exploder

CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers

CA Systems Performance for Infrastructure Managers (previously known as CA SystemEDGE) CA strives to meet our clients’ diverse and ever changing needs. CA products support and manage many of today's leading platforms, operating systems and applications across the IT enterprise. Many of our clients run applications and operating systems in Virtualization Environments, such as VMware and Solaris Containers, and Storage Array Networks (SAN). CA also makes extensive use of Virtualization/SAN Environments in its development and support organizations. CA notes any specific issues it detects in the respective product documentation. Note: CA does not test every possible setup of the CA IM products with Virtualization/SAN Environments and cannot certify specific client configurations. To facilitate a quick resolution and isolate the root cause of any potential CA IM product issue in a Virtualization/SAN Environment, CA is establishing the following support protocol:

The current GA version of a Virtualization/SAN Environment and the prior major version of that environment are supported. Any exceptions will be noted in respective product documentation.

All versions and configurations of applications and operating systems (kernels included) running under the Virtualization/SAN Environment must already be certified for the respective CA IM product version the client is running. To verify supported operating systems for running a specific CA IM product, review the system requirements section of the respective product documentation or check with your Support Availability Manager.

The client is responsible for properly configuring their virtual machine(s) and storage and applications for the Virtualization/SAN Environment. If using VMware for your Virtualization Environment, please review these documents prior to installing a CA IM product:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/en-us

CA Support Statement for Running CA Infrastructure Management Products in Virtualization and SAN Environments

2 Copyright © 2013 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

While CA does not require that clients recreate each issue without the Virtualization/SAN Environment before contacting support, we can request that the client diagnose and troubleshoot specific issues without the Virtualization/SAN Environment "variable". CA will do this when the issue is directly related to the Virtualization/SAN Environment.

While functional problems are rare in Virtualization/SAN Environments, performance and capacity problems are more commonly reported, particularly with enterprise-class products such as CA Infrastructure Management that recommend highly configured, dedicated systems for deployment. Diagnosis of this problem class may require the client to disable other applications and virtualized operating system instances which are competing for physical system resources and possibly remove the Virtualization/SAN Environment altogether.

Note: Some CA IM products have a very high dependency on disk I/O throughput due to intensive database writing and querying activity. They are particularly sensitive to maintaining adequate I/O performance in any virtualized configuration.

Virtualization/SAN Environments and configurations are diverse; CA may require extra time to understand, collect data, troubleshoot and possibly reproduce reported issues.

If CA Support cannot directly identify the root cause as a CA or Virtualization/SAN Environment issue, clients can open a support issue with the Virtualization/SAN Environment vendor and any other necessary third-party vendors to expedite the resolution of the issue. CA, the vendor(s), and the client will work together toward a quick resolution. CA, VMware, and many other software vendors belong to the Technical Support Alliance Network (www.tsanet.org).

Any known issues with running a CA IM product in Virtualization/SAN Environments will be noted in the

respective product documentation.