RAM and CPU Requirements for GW and SMS in VMWare Workstation

[ahmed_aburaihan]

Hallo CheckMates

I am creating a Lab environment in VMware Workstation. 

I have a HP Core i5 Notebook with 46 GB RAM. I want to install SMS and Gateway separately. 

Although I assign 12 GB RAM each, but still the performance is very slow and hang. 

Is there any special requirements to create LAB environment?

Thank you for a guidance. 

A. 

[Tal_Paz-Fridman]

Memory is above he minimal requirements:

https://sc1.checkpoint.com/documents/R81.20/WebAdminGuides/EN/CP_R81.20_RN/Content/Topics-RN/Open-Se...

This could be related to Disk performance - speed and space.

[ahmed_aburaihan]

Hi,

Thanks for the Answer. 

Will it have performance issue, if I use external hard drive as Disk Space for both SMS and GW?

Thanks,

A. 

[the_rock]

I know people that did that before, worked fine. Btw, I would say what I used to do in vmware, for mgmt, MIN 4 cores and 12 gb of ram and gateway, 8 cores and 16 gb of ram.

Andy

[ahmed_aburaihan]

Can we allot 4 cores to MGMT and 8 cores to Gateway if we have Core i5 CPU in total? 
How is it possible ? 
Thanks 

[the_rock]

Thats fine.

Andy

[Tal_Paz-Fridman]

Formally VMware Workstation is not not supported, VMware vSphere is but it might work (again for lab purposes):

https://www.checkpoint.com/support-services/hcl/

[ahmed_aburaihan]

Really! I have already installed SMS and GW in Vmware workstation, the only problem is performance.

Is vmware vSphere free to use? 

any guidance? thanks 

[the_rock]

Just give it more resources, it will solve the performance issues.

Andy

[G_W_Albrecht]

I also had such a deployment once and did experience the same, no matter what i tried - you have to live with the slowness, i would assume !

[the_rock]

Best reference I would say.

Andy

[PhoneBoy]

What the EXACT specifications for each VM?
This includes:

• Number of cores
• RAM
• Disk allocated
• Hardware type for NICs and Disk

And when you say slow, please describe the behavior in detail.

Note we do support vmxnet3 for NICs and the paravirtual SCSI driver.
Using other hardware might cause slower performance.

[ahmed_aburaihan]

It is slow which means that when I start the VMS, the SmartConsole takes alot of time to load, to publish and install policy. Overall performance is very bad even i am using a notebook with 48 gb ram. 

[oa_munich]

Which OS are you running underneath your VMware Workstation? Windows?
While publishing a policy, check Task Manager and see which processes are occupying your CPU. After this, check your hard disk / SSD - which processes are reading / writing.

If you have an Antivirus, Endpoint Protection of some sorts, you may want to create an exclusion for the folders containing your .vmdk files.

Also, you may want to turn on the option to store your hard drive not as a single file, but as series of 2GB files.

Your bottleneck seems to be IOPS, if you've granted sufficient RAM and CPU cores to your VMs.

VMware Workstation on Linux is dramatically faster than on Windows - if it is an option for you, I'd move to Linux as the host OS, with ext4 as file system.

[Timothy_Hall]

I use VMWare Workstation on Windows all the time for training classes and it performs fine.  A few things:

1) Reboot your PC and do not start any programs other than VMWare Workstation.

2) Make sure all memory used for your VMs is resident and not allowed to swap under Edit...Preferences which will improve performance, do not mess with the slider bar as the host OS needs a minimal amount of RAM to run and if it doesn't have it swapping will start (very bad):

3) Make sure the VT-x and VT-d processor options are set if they are available on your system.  These are normally disabled by default and need to be changed in the BIOS, enabling these will significantly improve memory and I/O access performance.  https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005486/processors.html

4) Try to give your SMS 12GB and your gateway 8GB.  That should be enough for decent performance.  If your workstation has 4 real cores, give each VM 4x1 (non-SMT) cores.  If your workstation only has two real cores give both 2x1 cores.  SMT/Hyperthreaded cores will slow down the SMS 11% or more.

5) Remove any non-essential hardware from your VMs such as printers and USB ports.

6) Disable any anti-virus/malware software if you can as this will be a huge drag on performance.

7) If you don't have a SSD some operations like starting the SmartConsole and installing policy will be slow due to reliance on the disk path, and there is not much you can do about it other than making sure your HD is defragmented and code is executing from RAM as much as possible without swapping.  An external drive (presumably attached via USB) will not be any better and will probably be worse for performance.  Also consider pre-allocating the drive space for both VMs to further reduce the I/O overhead of having to grow it dynamically.

😎 The default network interface type is almost certainly e1000 which is very slow.  You'll have to hand-edit the *.vmx files for your VMs while powered off and change e1000 to vmxnet3.

That should about do it, been working with these VM environments for many years and happy to answer further questions.

[oa_munich]

If you are importing an .ova file from here, the network adapters are created as vmxnet3.