Question: As environments have become increasingly complex - especially in large organizations, companies are trying to reduce their IT footprint. Server Virtualization is a common practice in both production and test environments because it facilitates a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Can BYOD Gateway run in a VM?
Answer: BYOD Gateway does support running in a Virtual Machine. The following recommendations are from Virtual Machine configurations we use at Kaseya:
- First, we regard even demo BYOD Gateway as a ‘production-class’ system, which means we set-up and fine tune servers, environment and as many other factors to adhere to a production level deployment. For us, this means a dedicated machine hosting the VM that runs the BYOD Gateway Server. The host is set up as a ‘production host’, with no automatic patching or rebooting (a common reason why VMs go down).
- The VM is set to use the most robust network model possible, using bridged network services (VM gets its own IP). A common issue with heavy network traffic apps like BYOD Gateway in VMs is when people use NAT to share the host IP address space, that has proven fragile. From our experience, the least fragile deployment is to install the gateway in a host OS (the one booting the hardware).
- The other technique to increase BYOD Gateway server availability is to actually monitor the process with a third-party pinging solution. We have a separate box running a 3rd party solution used to monitor whether the Gateway is accessible or not; if not, an alert is instantly emailed to our staff.
Applies to: Kaseya BYOD Suite.