Monitored Device (DataPower Gateway) Requirements

• DataPower Gateway firmware 10.5.x, 10.0.x and 2018.4.x.
  Some functionalities are also available for lower firmware levels. For more details please see Release Notes.

• API Connect 10.0.x, 2018.4.x and 5.0.8.x.

• DPOD only supports gateways with supported firmware levels that meet the minimum system requirements for DataPower Gateways.

• The DataPower Gateway language must be set to English.

Supported Hypervisors

DPOD can be installed on a virtual infrastructure (hypervisor). The following hypervisors are supported for running a DPOD production installation:

• VMWare ESX - v6.0, v6.5, v6.7, v7.0

• VMWare Workstation/Player - v14, v15, v16

• VMware Fusion - v11.0, v11.5, v12.x

• PureApp (only on Intel Processors) - no pattern yet available, can be provided only as an imported OVA.

Hyper-V

DPOD is NOT currently tested on Hyper-V, and there are currently no plans to add such testing in the future. Therefore it cannot be guaranteed that the installation of DPOD on Hyper-V works, nor can the performance of such an installation be guaranteed. If a customer decides to install DPOD on Hyper-V:

1. The support will be limited to application bugs and issues that affect other hypervisors as well (issues that are not specific to Hyper-V).

2. The customer might be asked to install DPOD on a supported infrastructure (such as VMware or physical servers) to prove that the issue is not specific to Hyper-V, in order to get support.

Note: DPOD can also be installed on physical servers (it might even be required for high loads), which can provide an alternative for customers that only own Hyper-V for virtualization. More information is available below.

Supported Physical Hardware

DPOD can be installed on physical servers (with Intel(C) based CPUs), especially when the load is high and the performance requires so. See the resources requirements listed below for more information.

Physical hardware should be purchased according to specifications provided by support L3 team in a short sizing process.

Resources Requirements

DPOD offers 6 deployment profiles:

• A development deployment profile (exists only in the Developer Edition ISO file).
  The Developer Edition ISO file name is DPOD-Developer-CentOS-<version>.iso, and can be downloaded from Fix Central.

• Five Standard Edition deployment profiles, available as:

  • Appliance Mode (ISO file) - DPOD_CentOS_<version>.iso - can be downloaded from PPA.

  • Non-Appliance Mode (Compressed Executable file) - DPOD_RedHat_<version>.cef - can be downloaded from PPA.

• It is not possible to change the deployment profile after DPOD is installed. In order to change from one deployment profile to another, a new installation of DPOD is required, discarding the old data collected so far.

Please consider the following rules of thumb for sizing:

• Customers that expect a load of up to 120 TPS (across all devices, including future growth) may choose one of the options from the table below.

• Customers that expect a load of over 120 TPS (across all devices, including future growth) are required to complete a sizing process by opening a support ticket with IBM Support.

• Currently a single installation of DPOD cell environment with 7 physical cell members can process up to ~20,000 TPS (assuming ~35 Syslog records per transaction on average). Customers with higher load than that may create several installations, each can handle up to ~20,000 TPS.

⁽¹⁾ The hosting server (e.g. ESXi) CPU utilization should not exceed 80%. To ensure best indexing performance, the virtual machine configuration should be set to have reserved CPUs.

⁽²⁾ Local SSD preferred - should be located on a data store separated from the other disks.

⁽³⁾ To ensure best query performance, the virtual machine configuration should be set to have reserved memory.

⁽⁴⁾ The TPS is the maximum total transactions load across all devices/domains connected to DPOD. If the TPS is too high and DPOD is unable to process all the incoming messages, some will be dropped, causing DPOD to show unreliable data (some transactions might not appear, some errors might not be displayed, some data such as latency might be missing from some of the transactions, etc.). When messages are dropped, an internal alert is generated and displayed in DPOD Web Console (under DPOD Health → Internal Alerts).

⁽⁵⁾ Virtual deployments performance cannot be guaranteed. Virtual deployments performance depends on the server hosting the VM (ESX), its configuration, the overall load it is experiencing at any given time from any of its VMs, and especially the performance of the remote storage.

⁽⁶⁾ Customers will be provided with specifications after a short sizing process with support L3 team.

Storage Requirements

• DPOD is I/O intensive, as it needs to persist all logs and information at very high rates. Therefore, for most of the installations, it needs to be configured with very fast disks, and with at least 3 separate disks (OS, app/logs, data).

• Some configurations, such as the Cell environment, require additional data disks.

• Usage of slow disks will impact the maximum TPS that DPOD can process, the performance of queries and the amount of time between the creation of transaction logs and the availability of the data on DPOD's dashboards.

• For each 1 TB of data 64 GB of RAM is recommended for responsive queries (dashboards and filters).

• NFS is not supported for the data disk, as the Store relies on file system behavior that NFS does not supply. Data corruption and other problems can occur.

• Software RAID (such as CentOS built-in RAID) is not supported.

• The data disk retention is automatically managed by DPOD. For each type of data (transactional, resources, payload, etc.), once its quota is full, old data will be discarded to make room for new data of the same type. A bigger disk size will hold a longer history.

Network Requirements

• DPOD requires at least one network interface for accessing DPOD's User Interface and communications with Gateway's Management Interface.

• Some configurations, such as the Cell environment, require two network interfaces.

Operating System Requirements (only applicable to Non-Appliance mode)

• CentOS 7.7-7.9 - x86-64 bit only on supported HW or Hypervisor as stated above.

• RHEL 7.7-7.9, 8.3-8.5 - x86-64 bit only on supported HW or Hypervisor as stated above.

• The OS must be a fresh install, without any other installed products.

• The OS support is not covered, but recommendations will be provided.

• Third-party software such as antivirus, cybersecurity, monitoring, APM, endpoint protection, backup, etc. might significantly decrease the performance of DPOD and impact its functionality. During the resolution of issues, DPOD support will ask the customer to disable any 3rd party software in order to isolate the issues and verify their source. Support cannot be provided if the 3rd party tools are not disabled.

Client Requirements

DPOD's Web Console requires the following for administration and end-users:

• A minimum screen resolution of 1280x720 pixels.

• Supported web browsers are:

  • Firefox - latest 2 versions

  • Chrome - latest 2 versions

  • Safari -  latest 2 versions

  • Microsoft Edge Chromium - latest 2 versions

  • Internet Explorer 11+ (not Edge)

Utility Software for Administrators

• An SSH client to connect to the DPOD appliance once installed.

• An FTP Client software to upload/edit files in the appliance when required.