Windows Virtual Machine Recommendations Guide

Purpose of this guide

QXTN has collected a number of performance, reliability and risk mitigation strategies over the last 15 years of operations. The essential items have been distilled into this recommendations guide. We have added tags of Essential, Highly Recommended and Risk Mitigation to prioritise the points appropriately.

Essential

Install VMware Tools or agreed similar utility for best performance and manageability of the VM within the QXTN ecosystem. These tools are used for VMware and other hypervisor integration.

See https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tools/11.0.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vmwaretools.doc/GUID-391BE4BF-89A9-4DC3-85E7-3D45F5124BC7.html for installation instructions.

NOTE – QXTN supplied template instances have VMware Tools preinstalled. Updates may be required.

Highly Recommended

  1. Please install version 5.4 of the Zabbix Agent is installed. Zabbix is the monitoring system used for watching the functional status of our Virtual Machines – by default a Zabbix agent is installed in c:\zabbix

See https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/installation/install_from_packages/win_msi

Once installed please edit the configuration file (usually c:\zabbix\conf\zabbix_agent.conf) and change the following options –

LogFileSize=10

Server=<monitoringIP>

ServerActive=<monitoringIP>

Hostname=<functional monitoring name agreed with QXTN>
  1. Make sure your workload is suitable for the number of provisioned CPUs. If in doubt, reduce vCPU counts until it impacts the server utilization.

See https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.monitoring.doc/GUID-5F8147A1-6416-4D29-BA3D-E4CED3966016.html for further information.

Risk Mitigation

If possible, create a “qxtnmanage” user with local administrator privileges for QXTN emergency maintenance purposes. Please set a secure password and advise QXTN. This password will be changed by QXTN support at the earliest convenient time and stored within the support password safe. The purpose of the user is to allow QXTN to conduct emergency maintenance or support if required.

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