The following topics help you to use Zen most effectively with a hypervisor product:

As with any complex software, hypervisor products can be installed various ways, including with nonstandard and atypical configurations. For compatibility with Zen, install and configure the hypervisor product using the best practices recommendations of the product vendor.

This section discusses the following topics for using Zen:

You can install Zen Enterprise Server, Cloud Server, or Workgroup on physical machines initially and later transition to VMs as your business needs change. For migrations from physical machines to VMs, you must ensure that the host name remains the same.

The Zen engine does not depend on IP address, but the VM itself might. If your VMs depend on raw IP addresses, or on the hosts file, rather than on the Domain Name System (DNS), ensure that you also take appropriate actions concerning IP addresses.

No special steps are needed to configure Zen to use hypervisor product features such as live migration, fault tolerance, high availability, paravirtualization, resource scheduling and disaster recovery. Zen remains authorized and fully functional provided that the host name remains consistent.

Certain scenarios, such as for disaster recovery, may require network and hardware changes. You may change the following without adversely affecting Zen:

Note that Zen is not aware of certain hardware changes, such as increasing memory or physical storage, if the database engine is running. You must stop and restart the database engine if you want it to be aware of such changes.

Zen may be used with VM resource pools and templates. For both uses, each copy of Zen requires its own product key. See License Enforcement in Zen User’s Guide.

Zen must be authorized in each VM within a resource pool that includes the database engine.

To authorize Zen in a VM launched from a template, you may use a configuration script. The script can invoke the CLI License Administrator tool to authorize the Zen key during the customizing of the guest operating system. See License Administrator Command Line Interface in Zen User’s Guide.

Remember to customize other properties of the guest operating system, such as host name, that are independent of running Zen.

As a general guideline, if you use affinity rules, ensure that all cores are running on the same socket. This aids performance of Zen because of its multicore support. Anti-affinity rules may also be used depending on your configuration.

If you use Raw Device Mapping (RDM) as the data drives for MSCS configurations, be aware of the considerations. Refer to the vendor documentation for RDM.

If you use fault tolerance/high availability with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), be aware that load balancing can be done only after failover. Refer to the vendor documentation for DRS.

To achieve the best performance for Zen, ensure the following:

See Data Backup with Backup Agent and VSS Writer.