Charon-SSP Cloud Instance Prerequisites

By selecting an instance type or shape, you select the virtual hardware that will be used for the Charon host instance in the cloud. Therefore, the selection of an instance type or shape determines the hardware characteristics of the Charon virtual host hardware (e.g., how many CPU cores and how much memory your virtual Charon host system will have).

The minimum hardware requirements are described below. To learn about the default settings and how to use the Charon-SSP configuration options to determine the resource allocation, refer to the different configuration sections of the general Charon-SSP User's Guide of your Charon-SSP version (see Charon-SSP for Linux), in particular, the CPU Configuration section.

Please note the following points regarding the sizing guidelines:

• The sizing guidelines below—in particular regarding number of host CPU cores and host memory—show the minimum requirements.
  Every deployment situation must be reviewed and the actual host sizing has to be adapted as necessary. For example, the number of CPU cores available for I/O must be increased if the guest applications produce a high I/O load. Also, a system with many emulated CPUs is typically able to create a higher I/O load and thus the number of CPU cores available for I/O may have to be increased. In a hyper-threading environment, for best performance, the number of CPU cores (i.e., real/physical CPUs) should be sufficient to fulfill CPU requirements of the active emulators, thus avoiding high-workload threads sharing one physical CPU core.

• The CPU core allocation for emulated CPUs and CPU cores for I/O processing is determined by the configuration. See CPU Configuration in the general Charon-SSP User's Guide for more information about this and the default allocation of CPU cores for I/O processing.

Important general information:

• To facilitate a fast transfer of emulator data from one cloud instance to another, it is strongly recommended to store all relevant emulator data on a separate disk volume that can easily be detached from the old instance and attached to a new instance.
• Please make sure to dimension your instance correctly from the beginning (check the minimum requirements below). The Charon-SSP license for Charon-SSP AL is created when the instance is first launched. Changing later to another instance size/type and thereby changing the number of CPU cores will invalidate the license and thus prevent Charon instances from starting (new instance required). If planning to use the Charon-SSP AL instance in AutoVE mode, be sure to include the AutoVE server information before first launch, otherwise the instance will register with the public license servers (registration only occurs at first launch).
• The license for Charon-SSP VE is created based on the fingerprint taken on the license server. If the license server is run directly on the emulator host and the emulator host later requires, for example, a change in the number of CPU cores, the license will be invalidated (new license and possibly new instance required). Hence, it is recommended to run the VE license server on a dedicated instance.