Support for virtual machines
Bravura Security Fabric is compatible with VMware, Xen Project, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine platforms. It can also be deployed on IaaS, including AWS. It generally works well with other virtualization platforms, but Bravura Security primarily tests with these. Bravura Security officially supports running Bravura Security Fabric on these virtual servers and will make a best effort to support customers who run on other hypervisors.
So long as the database server that hosts the Bravura Security Fabric back-end has access to reasonably fast I/O (e.g., NAS or similar) and so long as connectivity between the Bravura Security Fabric application sever and the database is fast and low latency (e.g., 1Gbps/1ms) there should is no adverse performance impact when comparing Bravura Security Fabric installed on hardware vs. Bravura Security Fabric installed on a similarly-equipped virtual server.
The key point above is to ensure sufficient I/O capacity for the database (MSSQL). If the database server is virtualized, using network attached storage (NAS) is recommended, as virtualized I/O (files such as VMDK’s emulating an HDD image) is often substantially slower than physical I/O.
Even where customers choose to deploy the main Bravura Security Fabric servers on raw hardware, virtual machines are an excellent platform for proxy servers, test servers, development servers and model PCs.
A related question is often “how large can the deployment get before we have to move from a VM to hardware?” Unfortunately, there is no simple, universal answer:
Virtual servers vary in capabilities – they may have a 32-bit or a 64-bit CPU, may have 1, 2, 4 or 8 CPU cores allocated, may have different amounts of memory and may link to different types of storage infrastructure.
The load created by the application also varies – is there complex business logic? Do users access the application at random times or all at once? Are there just a few or thousands of integrations?
This variability means that the safest bet is to use benchmark results, using a configuration as similar as possible to the production setup, to gauge the performance of Bravura Security Fabric on representative physical and virtual servers.
As a general standard, the ratio of vCPU to CPU (core) is 3:1. Therefore the actual vCPU performance will be 33% of the actual CPU. If the Bravura Security Fabric is deployed in a virtualized environment, and the general ratio on the hypervisor is 3:1, then a virtualized setup would require 6vCPU to match the minimal 2 CPU physical CPU requirement.