SMA Virtual Appliance support for Microsoft Hyper-V (SMA v11.2 or newer)

Starting with the K2 (11.2.0) release, Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 will be supported as a host platforms for both Central Management Server (CMS) as well as Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances. Customers who have a Microsoft Hyper-V based virtualization / private cloud infrastructure will be able to host SMA appliances as well as CMS.

NOTE: In SMA 100 series, Hyper-V deployment is supported from 10.0 onward.

Below are the imaging instructions for creating a new 11.2.0 virtual appliance on a Hyper-V host:

1. Copy the SMA ISO file to a location that can be accessed by the Hyper-V Manager
2. Create a Generation 1 virtual machine with 2 processors and 2GB of memory
3. Create a new 64 GB sized ("Dynamic") hard drive. The new drive name should have the ".vhdx" suffix (instead of ".vhd")
4. Add the hard drive to the virtual machine on IDE Controller 0.
5. Create a second network adapter (Note: The virtual machine is created with just one network adapter)
6. The virtual machine gets created with a DVD. Specify the media for the DVD to be the SMA ISO file. Change the virtual machine BIOS boot order so that DVD is first.
7. Start the virtual machine. It will boot from the DVD.
8. After a successful boot an SMA appliance is created and the virtual machine is automatically stopped.
9. The ISO DVD is no longer needed and can be removed. Change the BIOS boot order so that the hard drive is higher than the DVD
10. Connect the network adapters to the appropriate virtual switch in the Hyper-V environment.
11. The next time the virtual machine is started, it will boot from the hard drive and the Admin can configure the virtual appliance from the console

Caveats

Runtime Resources Required

Memory: 2GB
Disk: 64GB
CPU: 2

Performance Characteristics

Due to limitations in the native drivers we are using for the Linux kernel we have in the SMA, the maximum concurrent user count we are comfortable with the Hyper-V platform supporting for SMA is 250CCU.

Supported Hyper-V Platforms

Only Windows Server 2012 R2 and later