Plan your installation in a test environment

Install the Splunk App for VMware into a test environment before you install it in a production environment. You can work out the complexities and issues that you might encounter in your deployment.

After you install the Splunk App for VMware in your test environment, scale the deployment with more advanced Splunk platform deployment features, such as search head clustering and indexer clustering.

If you do not have access to a test environment, limit the number of hosts and vCenter Servers you use when you first deploy the app, and then add complexity after your initial setup is successful.

Splunk App for VMware sample test environment

Use the following test environment size:

• One vCenter Server that supports 70 or fewer ESXi hosts.
• One instance of Splunk Enterprise with one search head and one indexer. See Platform and hardware requirements for Splunk Enterprise versions that support Splunk App for VMware.
• One Data Collection Node (DCN).

In your test environment, deploy the DCN using the configured Splunk OVA to collect vCenter Server API data. With the following specifications, one data collection node can collect from 70 ESXi hosts or fewer, with a ratio of 25 to 30 virtual machines per host. The default virtual machine included with the Splunk App for VMware is set with this configuration.

• Four cores. 8 vCPUs or 4 vCPUs with two cores with a reservation of 2GHz
• 12GB memory with a reservation of 1GB
• 16GB of disk space

Optionally, you can set up a syslog collector when you install and configure Splunk App for VMware. This action is not required for a working VMware app deployment. See Configure the Splunk Add-on for VMware to collect log data from ESXi hosts.

See "Deploy OVA to create a Data Collection Node" section of Splunk OVA for VMware.