Is Sentinel supported in a virtualized environment?

Many business cases justify the use of a virtualized environment. Consolidation of under-utilized resources and test environments are two cases where virtualization is especially useful. Virtualization implies a layer of software replacing hardware causing a performance penalty. Virtualized hardware also sometimes has support issues due to a lack of testing.

The Sentinel development and test teams make extensive use of virtualization to run Sentinel and related products in a virtualized environment in the labs; however, due to the high performance nature of Sentinel, Novell recommends that Sentinel be run on dedicated hardware in production environments.

Novell will fully support Sentinel 6.x, Sentinel RD, Sentinel Log Manager and Novell Identity Audit on VMware ESX Server. All other virtual platforms should work; however; support for those will be best effort.  Novell will make a best effort attempt to support Sentinel and related products in virtualized environments, but all performance testing is done on dedicated hardware. Novell makes no guarantees about the accuracy of published performance estimates on anything other than the environment specified in the installation guide. Virtual Machines, or VMs, offer cost savings at the cost of some performance in even the best-performing implementations.