NSM provides the base systems management infrastructure, while the ASM piece serves up the virtualization and cluster management wares. CA's virtualization management support for VMware's VirtualCenter/ESX and Hyper-V is only one aspect of the package used to manage large networks of systems. But for our purposes, we limited the scope of testing to the virtualization components only.

We set up NSM/ASM to run on a Windows 2003 Server R2 machine (it can also run on a Unix server) with a SQL Server 2005 server using mixed-mode authentication.

As for physical resources necessary, CA recommends 4GB of memory and at least 20GB of hard drive space in total. For CPU, minimum requirements are 2 GHz Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP 2000+. We then had to install NSM and ASM management and performance agents on each machine and also ASM virtual agents for it to work with Hyper-V or VirtualCenter host machines we wanted to manage.

Starting up

CA recommended that we download a best practices utility which should have enabled us to install NSM and ASM together but the installer utility would not run. CA technical support walked us through a manual install that took four hours. When installing NSM, we had to select things such as Management Database, Agent Technologies, WorldView (a visual representation of your network showing all machines and devices connected to the network), Enterprise Management, Notification Services, Configuration Manager and Web Reporting options.