Physical vs. virtual hardware

Most customers run at least some part of their Traveler environment on virtual hardware. Doing so is fully supported however to avoid pitfalls, use the following best practices.

  • Never run the Traveler server or the Traveler Enterprise Database Server on a virtual machine that shares resources on demand with other VMs. Sharing CPU, memory and disk I/O with other VMs can greatly impact the performance of the Traveler environment and should be avoided.
  • The virtual machine that is hosting the Traveler database must have a dedicated physical volume assigned (SSD recommended). In a standalone Traveler environment, this is the Traveler server itself. In an HA Environment this is the VM that is hosting the enterprise database instance that the Traveler environment is using. The Traveler database is disk I/O intensive, sharing this volume with other VMs will likely lead to disk I/O contention and poor performance. In addition, Spindle disk drives should never be used for the VM hosting the Traveler database. See the topic on disk configuration for more details.
If you follow these best practices, using virtual hardware can be a great way to save cost and allow for ease of scalability in deploying new environments in short a timeframe as usage grows. Each VM deployment is different, therefore it’s important to monitor the performance of your VMs to ensure they are meeting the demands of your environment.