Lenovo XClarity Administrator Software User Guide

Lenovo® XClarity™ Administrator
Performance Guide
Tips and Techniques Version 3.5.0 and later
February 2022
© Copyright Lenovo 2015, 2022. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This document aids the deployment of Lenovo XClarity Administrator by providing tips and techniques to help IT administrators optimize its performance.

Virtual Machine Requirements

The Lenovo XClarity Administrator supports deployment to the following host:

• Container environments
  o Docker v20.10.9
  o Docker-compose v1.29.2

• Hypervisors
  o Citrix Hypervisor v8.2
  o Citrix XenServer v7.6
  o CentOS 7 and 8
  o Microsoft Windows Server 2019 with Hyper-V installed
  o Microsoft Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V installed
  o Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V installed
  o Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V installed
  o Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)
  o Red Hat v8.x with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) v2.12.0 installedo Red Hat v7.x with KVM v1.2.17 installed
  o Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS with KVM v4.2.3 installed
  o VMware ESXi 7.0, U1 and U2
  o VMware ESXi 6.7, U1, U2, and U3
  o VMware ESXi 6.5, U1 and U2
  o VMware ESXi 6.0, U1, U2, and U3
  o VMware ESXi 5.5, U1, U2, and U3
  o VMware ESXi 5.1, U1, U2, and U3

A single XClarity Administrator instance can support a maximum of 1,000 devices.
The minimum virtual-machine requirements for the appliance are two virtual CPUs, and 8 GB of RAM, and 192 GB of storage for use by the XClarity Administrator virtual appliance. The following table lists the minimum recommended virtual-machine configurations for a given number of devices. Keep in mind that if you run the minimum configuration, you might experience longer than expected completion times for management tasks. For initial deployment tasks such as firmware updates and server configuration, you might need to increase the VM resources temporarily.
Depending on the size of your managed environment and the pattern of use in your installation, you might need to add resources to maintain acceptable performance. If you
frequently see processor usage in the system resources dashboard displaying high or  very high values, consider adding 1-2 virtual processor cores. If your memory usage persists above 80% at idle, consider adding 1-2 GB of RAM. If your system is responsive at a configuration as defined in the table, consider running the VM for a longer period to assess system performance.

For information about how to free up disk space by deleting XClarity Administrator resources that are no longer needed, see Managing disk space in the XClarity
Administrator online documentation.
Managed vs. local authentication
XClarity Administrator contains an embedded (local) lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) server that is used, by some types of managed devices, as a user registry when managed authentication is enabled during management. This imposes additional network, processor, and memory requirements that might not be desirable in very large
environments where other user registries (such as Microsoft Active Directory or OpenLDAP) are available.
When managed authentication is disabled (local authentication is used), XClarity Administrator uses stored credentials to manage authorization and access to devices. A
stored credential corresponds to an active user account on a device or in a supported external authentication server.
Note: If devices are managed by XClarity Administrator using managed authentication without using stored credentials, and you want to change those devices to use local
authentication, you must unmanage the devices and repeat the management operation using a stored credential. The following steps describe how to manage a device using a
stored credential and an external LDAP server.

1. Configure the managed devices to connect to an external LDAP environment, such as Microsoft Active Directory or OpenLDAP.
2. Configure a service account in the external LDAP environment that XClarity Administrator can use to communicate with managed devices.
3. Create stored credentials in XClarity Administrator that correspond to the service account that was created in the previous step.
4. Manage the devices with managed authentication disabled, by unchecking the Managed Authentication checkbox on the Manage dialog.
   For more information, see Managing the authentication server in the XClarity Administrator online documentation.

Processor monitoring
When assessing the performance of an XClarity Administrator virtual machine, remember that the management appliance runs tasks in the background that might make processor load variable and difficult to predict. Among these tasks are:

• Connectivity check, which is performed approximately every 5 minutes to ensure that a device is online
• Event-based inventory collection, which is performed when an event that is accompanied by an inventory change is detected.
• Full inventory collection, which is performed every 24 hours to ensure that inventory is up to date.

The device state can also affect processor load. If a device is powered on and contains no valid boot targets, the device eventually reboots and retries the boot process. This can result in a regular set of events that cause unexpected processor consumption. If there are many devices in this state, the effect might be significant, leading you to increase VM provisioning.

Performance Tips and Techniques

XClarity Administrator is easy to deploy into production. There is little that you need to do to tune it for performance. This section describes features in the product to optimize the user experience in larger-scale managed environments. There are also some useful tips to help with optimizing for large scale.
Use Bulk Import to Manage Hardware
XClarity Administrator has a Bulk Import function on the Discover and Manage New Devices panel (see Figure 1), which is located under the Hardware menu. You can use
Bulk Import to batch-manage a large number of devices. Simply import the bulk- import file, and the devices are managed in parallel.
Discover and Manage New Devices
If the following list does not contain the device that you expect. use the Manual Input option to discover the device. For more information about why a device might not be aJtorraticaty discovered, see the Cannot discover a device help topic.

You can download the template bulk-import files from the Bulk Import dialog in either .XLS or .CSV format; however, the file must be save in .CSV format before importing the file. You can monitor the progress of the bulk-import job using the Jobs panel, located under the Monitoring menu.
Not all fields in the bulk import template are required to manage a device. These optional fields automate the bulk management process. See the instructions in the XLS template and the product documentation on bulk import for further detail.
Delay Deployment or Firmware Update Tasks after a Restart
After restarting XClarity Administrator, inventory is collected for each managed device to ensure that the program has the current details of your hardware. The program also
performs additional startup processing to optimize later use. After a restart, wait approximately 30-45 minutes, depending on the number of managed devices, before attempting firmware updates, configuration-pattern deployments, or OS deployments, especially against multiple systems. This ensures that more processing resources are
available for your task. To determine whether the initial inventory process has finished, watch the XClarity System Resources panel on the Dashboard (see Figure 2). While the inventory process is running, the load is typically “very high.” After completion, the load drops below “very high” and stays there until another processor-intensive task is performed.

Use Filters and System Selection to Create Subsets of Lists
XClarity Administrator offers several ways in the user interface to display a subset from a large list.

• The Filter input field is available for most lists and can be used to dynamically create a subset based on character input found in any of the available columns.
• The system selector pull-down menu is available for selected lists and can be used to limit a list to the components within a single Flex System chassis or rack.
• The severity icons are available for specific lists and can be used to limit the list to the components with the selected severities.
  When available, these controls are just above the top right corner of the list as shown in Figure 3. When a list of items is large, it is helpful to use these powerful methods to create a more manageable list.

Copy Update Compliance Policies to Create New Policies with Few Changes
The XClarity Administrator firmware-updates function uses compliance policies to dictate the update recipe for a given set of managed devices. The product comes with a default compliance policy for all supported devices.
Users can also create their own custom policies from the available updates in the firmwareupdate repository. This can be done  from scratch if  the policy only applies to a
single machine type or small set of machine types. If the policy is intended to be a new global policy for all supported elements, you might find it easier to start with a copy of the Lenovosupplied policy, which you can then tailor to your requirements, while retaining the recommendations from Lenovo for elements you are not changing from the default policy setting.

Use Global Update Compliance Policy Function
The XClarity Administrator updates function automatically assigns a firmware- compliance policy to each device when it is managed. The policy that is assigned is the last-edited policy that can be applied to the device. To change assignments after management or when multiple compatible policies exist for a device, you can use choose one of the following options for bulk application:

• Apply the policy to all applicable devices
• Apply the policy to all applicable devices without a current assignment
• Apply the policy to only selected applicable devices and overwrite currently assigned policies
• Apply the policy to only selected applicable devices with no current policy assignment

The last two options can be combined with the filter function, the system selector, and the select-all check-box in the Apply/Activate table. For example, to assign a policy to all elements in a Flex chassis named “Chassis1”, type “Chassis1” in the filter box, select the select-all checkbox in the upper-left corner of the table, and then the assign policies using one of the “Apply the policy to only selected devices” options.
LENOVO PROVIDES THIS PUBLICATION “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. This information could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Changes are made periodically to the information herein; these changes will be incorporated in new editions of the publication. Lenovo may make improvements and/or changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described in this publication at any time without notice.
Any references in this publication to non-Lenovo Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The materials at those Web sites are not part of the materials for this Lenovo product, and use of those Web sites is at your own risk.
Any performance data contained herein was determined in a controlled environment. Therefore, the result obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. Some measurements may have been made on developmentlevel systems and there is no  guarantee thatthese measurements will be the  same on generally availablesystems. Furthermore,  some measurements may have been estimated through extrapolation. Actual results may vary. Users of this document should verify the
applicable data for their specific environment.
Lenovo, the Lenovo logo, Flex System, and XClarity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both. Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Server are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

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