Best practices and recommendations for implementing the manager's operating system.

[Jarvis_]

Good evening, in a given environment, Manager is deployed on a physical appliance listed in the compatible hardware documentation: https://www.checkpoint.com/support-services/hcl/#open-servers.

Due to backup limitations and potential problems with the physical host, is this type of deployment recommended? Or would it be ideal to deploy Manager on a virtual machine?

I ask this because I had many problems using the Manager operating system backup/snapshot via GAIA. Whenever I needed it for restoration, it didn't work correctly; either Manager returned with database problems or uploading during restoration was not possible. What saved me was the VM backup/snapshot in the virtualizer.

In this case, are both options recommended or would it be ideal to deploy Manager in virtualized environments?

[the_rock]

If I were you, I would simply deploy it in VM. Here is my reasoning for that, so you dont think Im just making stuff up. First off, its easy to scale up if needed. 2nd, you can literally do snapshot of the VM itself, retore if needed. 3rd, think abouit...say you ever ran out of disk space, super easy to add new HDD.

[Jarvis_]

Hi the_rock,

I share the same opinion; considering scalability and restoration needs, I only see benefits.

I haven't been able to find any official documentation recommending deployment on a virtual machine for this purpose. Is there any?

[the_rock · Accepted solution]

Here are some links that can be helpful.

https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk104848

https://sc1.checkpoint.com/documents/R81/WebAdminGuides/EN/CP_R81_SecurityManagement_AdminGuide/Topi...

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

https://www.checkpoint.com/support-services/hcl/#open-servers

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

https://sc1.checkpoint.com/documents/R81/WebAdminGuides/EN/CP_R81_RN/Topics-RN/Open-Server-Hardware-...

[PhoneBoy · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can deploy management in a VM.
We even have a best practices SK on it: https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk104848 

Note that we only support VM-level snapshots/backup if the virtual machine is powered off.
Doing this while the VM is active may result in an unusable snapshot/backup.