About the virtual appliance
This guide provides information about creating, configuring, backing up and recovering virtual appliances. Virtual appliances run in a virtual environment and are packaged with a guest operating system and optional application software, while integration appliances are physical machines.
Cast Iron® products perform equally well in both the virtual and physical worlds. You can install the Cast Iron Operating System (CIOS) on a single virtual machine running one integration project or on multiple virtual machines running many projects to create a data center infrastructure. For information on creating virtual appliances with CIOS as the guest operating system, see Deploying an OVF template.
Your virtual appliance environment should consist of the following:
- A host machine (desktop computer or server).
- CPU (for example Intel® VT-x or AMD®-V) with virtualization technology enabled. (In some cases, virtualization technology must be enabled through BIOS).
- 60 GB disk space.
- Supported configuration of either 1 CPU, 4 GB RAM or 2 CPU, 8 GB RAM. Ensure that the host has enough physical RAM to run the selected configuration or system performance might be affected.
- VMware® ESX® or ESXi version 5.0 or later. For more information on VMware products and ESX, go to http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/microsite.do and click VMware ESX and ESXi Comparison.
- Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition installation file (in OVA format).
- VMware vCenter® Server, 4.0.0, 258672 (optional).
- VMware VMotion® and VMware High Availability add-ons (optional). When added to your installation, VMware add-ons can manage and balance your workload across virtual machines, find an optimum data center location for a virtual machine and manage OS related failures. Refer to VMware documentation to learn more about add-ons and for tips on setting up your virtual environment.
Note: Shared storage, such as a SAN, is optional. Shared storage
is required to enable VMware features such as VMware VMotion and VMware
High Availability.