Preparation checklist

As a Solutions administrator you need access to the vSphere client, Esx/i hosts, and vCenter boxes and you must have permission to install the software on the boxes. Before you install Splunk for VMware into your environment, review this preparation checklist. It outlines the main things you should address before attempting the install.

The Checklist

Before installing the Solution, you must have:

• A list of the vCenter Servers and ESX/i hosts you want to monitor.
• Administration access to the windows based vSphere client (username/password).
• Administration access to the windows machine where VC is installed (username/password).
• Administration access to the vCenter Server (username/password).
• Common administration credentials for all of your Esx/i hosts (username/password).
• Administration credentials for the physical machine on which your Splunk search head resides (to install the app). (username/password).
• Administration credentials to Splunk (search head and indexers). (username/password).
• The ip-address for the machine on which Splunk ( the indexer) is installed and the ports on which they are listening.
• Get the VLAN ID on which to deploy the OVA.
• Check your system requirements. See System Requirements for a list of requirements.
• Check that the Solution is compatible with the Splunk version you are running. Do you have Splunk Indexers and Search heads set up onto which you can install the Solution?
• Check that the Solution is compatible with the vCenter server and ESX/i version you are running.
• Check that the Solution works with the resources that are set for the FA VM:
  • Do you have the latest FA VM version?
  • Do you have the 3rd-party software from VMware? You must have login access to VMware's web site to download the VMware Perl SDK version 5.0 update 1 package (64bit for linux) called VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.0.0-615831.x86_64.tar.gz and copy (scp) it onto the FA. See Install the Perl API package in this manual.
• Do you have Sideview Utils installed on the search heads where the App is installed to ensure that the dashboards within the App are correctly displayed?
• Check storage and licensing requirements. To learn more about storage and licensing requirements for your data, see the Deployment Considerations topic.
  • Do you have a Splunk license?
  • Can your data license handle the volume of data in the Splunk for VMware Solution (over 1 GB/day for each ESX/i host)?
• What VMware resources do you want to Splunk and display in the Splunk App for VMware? For more information, see the Plan your deployment topic.
• Understand your resource requirements.
  • The FA VM is configured to monitor up to 20 hosts (with 25 VMs per host). This is the default setting. Deploy more than one Forwarder Appliance to facilitate larger environments with the following virtual machine resources:
    • 4 vCPU w/ normal "shares" and a 2048MHz "reservation" Limit-unlimited.
    • 4 GB memory w/ normal "shares" and a 128 MB "reservation" Limit-unlimited.
    • 20GB of disk space.
  • If you increase the resources in the FA VM you can monitor up to 30 hosts (at 25 VMs per host). Increase the resources to:
    • 4 vCPU w/ normal "shares" or 2 vCPUs with 2 cores each, and a 4GHz "reservation" Limit-unlimited.
    • 4 GB memory w/ normal "shares" and a 2 GB "reservation" Limit-unlimited.
• To deploy the Solution for a larger deployment, see the Scaling your deployment topic in this manual.
• Know the VMware datacenter location that you will use.
• You must have network connectivity and have access through firewalls to the machines included as part of the Solution.
• Download the Splunk for VMware solution components from Splunkbase. For instructions, see "Go to Splunkbase" in this manual.
• Set up forwarders on your vCenter machine.Modify an existing outputs.conf file if you have a Splunk indexer(s) and Splunk forwarder that already work in your environment or create a new outputs.conf file to set up forwarding on a new indexer so that you can send VMware data to the indexer. For instructions, see Set up forwarders on your vCenter machine in the Configure outputs.conf topic.
• Create or confirm your service accounts and permissions. You can automatically create user accounts with correct permissions on the ESX/i hosts using the logincreator.pl tool on the Forwarder Appliance or you can create them manually as a systems administration task.

Important: You must have the FA VM deployed and turned on in your environment to create service accounts using logincreator.pl.