Deploying the OVA on a VMware hypervisor

How to deploy the OVA to create a DataPower® Gateway on a VMware hypervisor. This deployment applies to VMware products.

Before you begin

Obtain the deployment package and verify file integrity.

IBM provides one OVA file for each virtual edition offering.
  • xxx.prod.ova is the OVA production file.
  • xxx.nonprod.ova is the OVA nonproduction file.
  • xxx.dev.ova is the OVA developers file.

A hypervisor accesses resources that they are provisioned with. You must understand the nature of your network environment.

About this task

The OVA deployment creates a DataPower Gateway with an XML configuration file and two virtual disks in virtual machine disk (VMDK) format.
  • The XML file contains resource descriptions, such as vCPU, memory, and disk information.
  • The first disk is a 16 GB encrypted SCSI virtual disk. This disk contains the DataPower firmware and stores user configuration data and artifacts. You cannot change the size.
  • The second disk is an empty 16 GB virtual disk. This disk supplies storage after you enable the RAID volume. This disk is an SCSI-attached LSI Logic virtual device. You can increase or reduce the volume in the hypervisor client. However, after you create a file system on the RAID volume, you cannot change the RAID volume unless you re-create a file system. Reducing the RAID volume with a file system breaks the file system. Increasing the volume does not take effect until you re-create the file system.
  • When B2B storage is enabled during initial firmware configuration, only half of the RAID volume is available for service data processing. In this case, increase the RAID volume to process large documents and manage high throughput.
  • If the deployment uses thin provisioning, the hypervisor allocates 258.6 MB disk space that expands as needed.
  • If the deployment uses thick provisioning, the hypervisor allocates 32 GB disk space.
The absolute minimum resource allocation depends on expected workload and edition. After deployment, you can increase resource settings to meet workload requirements.
  • Without API workload, the minimum resource allocation is 4 vCPU (virtual processors) and 4 GB RAM.
  • With API workload, the minimum resource allocation is 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM independent of edition.
The following table lists the named configurations and resource allocation for production edition. For nonproduction and developers editions, the default allocation is preset. Independent of the edition, you can adjust resource settings after deployment.
Table 1. Named configuration and their resource allocation for production edition.
Configuration name vCPU RAM (GB)
Small 4 8
Standard (default) 8 16
Enterprise 16 96

The installation templates define the virtual network interface controllers (NICs), which ignore your settings for the physical mode and flow control mode of the network adapters. The eth0, eth1, eth2, and eth3 NICs are available.

The following table shows an example mapping between the DataPower NICs and the VMware virtual network adapters in a default vSphere network setup with four physical NICs available.

Table 2. Mapping between DataPower NICs and VMware network adapters.
DataPower network interface controller VMware adapter name
eth0 VM Network 1
eth1 VM Network 2
eth2 VM Network 3
eth3 VM Network 4

Procedure

  1. Import the OVA.
  2. Deploy the OVA with the hypervisor product interface.
    Although the OVA is configured to set 8 vCPUs, you can change the allocation.
  3. Start the virtual machine with the hypervisor product interface.
    If you see a vCPU error in VMware Workstation Player, change the vCPU number to 2.

What to do next

Modify resource allocation in the hypervisor product interface as necessary.

Initialize the DataPower Gateway. When you log in, use admin for the username and password.