I have a problem - CPU sometimes spikes to 100%. I've read that the cause may be Virtual environment. I use VMWare and Confluence 3.0.2. Could anybody tell me what can I do. I didn't find anything in documentation.

This really is great news! Is the support for virtualized Confluence limited to VMWare? Or do you also bless other virtualization platforms such as Citrix XenServer? What about opensource alternatives such as KVM virtualization on RHEL5 or Centos5 ? Sorry, had to ask.

Well done guys! It sounds like the recommendation is still from large instances - stick to dedicated, but still good to be supported for our existing virtual instances!

We've now published our official 'Confluence running on VMWare' results in the Confluence Documentation.

We've also updated our note about our support for virtualisation (i.e. VMWare).

I read the comment as Atlassian will support VMWare ESX environment ... but only once they complete their testing.

It could also be interpreted as "go forth and try it out, but be patient with us if you experience issues as our knowledge base around virtualised environments is practically empty".

The warning against using VMs is still on http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/System+Requirements

Did I read Audra Eng's comment correctly? Atlassian now supports VMware ESX environments? This was a bone of contention for my team and would end the debate if this is correct. We are planning to migrate off of a physical box to a VMware ESX environment next month. Preliminary findings on a DEV system are good. Some sluggishness noticed but I am confident we can tune it (the performance was not so far off the mark ast to make us abondon the idea all together).

I want to support the common opinion ...
We are evaluation confluence, one critical requirement from IT side is the option to virtualize this application.

Planned:

• ESX3i with RHEL + SQL 2k5 DB Cluster
• probable with an (exitsting) apache reverse proxy in front
• finaly with 4000 named users
• scoped as an corporate intranet

Screenshot of frozen restore (from export zipfile of xml and attachments)

strace on linux of frozen Confluence (restore operation in progress).

Running on Oracle VM Server 2.1.5 (Xen 3.1.4). Guest OS is CentOS 5.3 x86_64

@Russell Ensley - Just reading your comment. If you are thinking for performance reasons - We have been running Confluence 2.9 in a virtualized environment. A bit of sizing stats - 15,000 pages, 10,000 attachments, 900+ authors, 2,000+ users. Average 1,000 unique visitors (not page views) / day. Running on a RHEL vm, with Java memory set to 1.5g, Dual CPU. No performance issues faced. Had to tune database connection pool settings to handle around more concurrent users but that pretty much the only 'performance' related issue we have faced.

We haven't faced any issues at this stage that Atlassian hasn't been able to help us out with/resolve which relate specifically to the fact that we are running it on a VMWare ESX environment.

We have been testing Confluence 3.0 successfully on VMWare, and I will give you the details from QA once sent to me. We will provide support for VMWare ESX environments, but we still need to complete proper load testing and understand customer configurations of their VMWare environment and ensure that they will work properly. We do not advise that you run multiple enterprise application images on the same system as Confluence, and that you provide sufficient memory and CPU allocation to Confluence. We request that you work closely with us if you have problems, providing your configuration environments and have patience with us as we standardise on best practices for VMWare installations.

--Audra Eng
VP, Product Management

I am in agreement. We are really eager to run Confluence at our university. But we are committed to running this non-clustered in a VMWare ESX environment and have placed considerable investments in the VMWare environment. Purchasing an independent server to the tune of $5000 is pushing us away from using this application.

Can i get a clear answer on "if you will still provide support if we run this in a VMWare environment". I will be making a call tomorrow and if we won't get any support in this environment, we will probably pass over your software for something that will.

The industry and our institution in particular has a considerable investment in this outstanding new technology and you are going to lose customers without this support. But i need to make a quick decision. I will be making a call to one of you partners tomorrow to get clarification on this.

Changing the title of this page from "clarify support" - the documentation is clear - to "provide support".

Some customers report VM instances that work fine. Others report that it works fine for a while, then experiences performance issues under specific conditions. Still others report that it's unusable from installation, so this all seems to be implementation specific (the VM implementation and the Confluence implementation) One report is that it works ok with this configuration:

VMWare ESX 3.5 managed by virtual center running on a HP 7000 chassis Blade center connected to a IBM midrange DS4800 SAN

Atlassian won't know for sure what configurations work until we include VM instances in our QA deployments.

Patrick,

Atlassian Support will suggest migrating off of VM if you have performance issues. We will help with everything else.

Jeremy Largman
Atlassian Support

Hi Atlassian Support,

If I decide to install my confluence on a VM server, will you support me for any issue in the confluence application, except for a perfomance issue ???

I hope that you will support soon VM enviroment because it's now a standard in all entreprise in these days.

Regards,
Patrick Maille
CSC - system admin

Hi Rahul,

I just wanted to note one point, the Confluence virtual appliance you mention above (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1043) was not created by, nor is it supported by Atlassian. It is in fact out of date as it was released in 2007.

Regards,
Nicholas Muldoon
Sales Engineer

Your response says that the VMWare is the root of the problem, however you
don't state why and the bug report that you refer to does not state that.
All it says is that virtual environments are not supported. All
mainstream vendors are supporting their products up to the point that the
problem is clearly the virtual layer, but I am not seeing that from
Atlassian. Can you tell us why the virtual environment is expected to be
the problem? Of the over 300 virtual machines we are running, with the
majority being java workloads, this product is the only one that has
stability issues.

Virtualization is clearly the industry direction, especially for smaller
workloads such as wikis. It appears that Atlassian is taking an arbitrary
stance not to support installations at all in virtual environments. This
is a strange stance especially when the foundational components such as
Windows, Linux, Tomcat, Java, SQL server, etc. are all supported in VMs.
In addition, a virtual appliance of the Confluence Wiki is available on
VMWare's virtual appliance marketplace
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1043. A VM of confluence is
available for everyone to try but it is not supported ... something is
wrong here.

When do you expect to start supporting customers tha thave deployed
Confluence in virtual environments?

Should we look elsewhere for supported software?

Increasing priority of this to reflect that CPU spikes and Confluence becomes unusable in VM environments. I chose "Blocker" because it can prevent a Confluence deployment and often requires a significant environment change. The knowledge base article is here:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/CPU+Spikes+when+Using+VMWare+or+Other+Virtual+Environment

I agree - we need support on VMWare.

Also the above description states "not supported for clustered Confluence" - does this mean that single instances are supported?

Frankly, I think that Confluence simply does need to be supported in a virtualized environment. As a minimum, in VMware Infrastructure 3. Virtualization is the direction we're all moving in and I'd hate to see Confluence left behind.

Confluence is not supported when run in virtualised environments, such as VMware. In saying that, the Confluence Support team will provide as much assistance as possible for your Confluence deployment. However, please keep in mind that we cannot replicate your specific virtual environment, nor can we ascertain the load of the various virtual machines on your physical hardware.

Due to the complex nature of virtual environments it can be difficult to pin point performance problems. As such, if the support team is unable to identify any inherent performance limitation within a deployment of Confluence we may request that you replicate the performance problem on physical hardware.

Thanks,
Nick

Hi Atlassian-Support,

We have an urgent request on the support of a VM environment. We do not plan to run Confluence in a cluster but we will definitly run Confluence on a VM environment.

Could you please clarify if this will work and why this is currently not supported. As other reporters already stated: This is a very common scenario nowadays!

Thank you and best regards!

I definitely agree with this. The servers in my company are quickly being migrated to VM environments and I would like to get more specific information on what works and what doesn't. So that I can make a confident decision of whether to go with it or not.
I have been running to 2.9.2 on VM server in my sandbox for the last couple of weeks and seems to be fine in terms of functionality but performance is a bit sluggish.

I have a VMware ESX installation, Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64, Java6_10, jboss4.2.2GA, apache2/mod-ssl/mod-jk with DB2-C v9.5.1.

I understand Confluence isn't a HA application, and that application level clustering is how it must go, for single nodes the issue should only be performance. I just tried Confluence 2.9.2/2.10, it does appear sluggish, though this may be due to FE chomping all the resources, Confluence cache misses during initial usage or both. There are many references to VMware and Confluence but not Jira. I found performance for Jira to be fine, potentially due to CPU upgrade etc.

For info, VMware ESX IOTimings as follows:

TOTALS
----	----	----	----	----
stat	avg	median	min	max
----	----	----	----	----
open	90,108	42,509	0	40,898,577
r/w	30,236	29,126	0	291,040
close	33,347	30,657	0	470,202
delete	62,340	58,073	1	1,523,728
----	----	----	----	----

Run 2:
TOTALS
----	----	----	----	----
stat	avg	median	min	max
----	----	----	----	----
open	49,254	42,035	0	2,948,652
r/w	29,993	28,733	0	283,219
close	31,966	30,141	0	394,911
delete	61,721	57,758	0	1,934,773
----	----	----	----	----

Works just fine for me on VMware VM, RHEL4, Apache + mod_ssl + mod_jk. MySQL db on another non-VM server tho.

I was supposed to run a benchmark where I install n instances of Confluence on a non-VM host versus one VM for each instance to find out the overhead. Wonder when I'll have the time... Anyone wanna fund this?

The standalone system has been working fine on VM until we tried to implement SSL. apache is hogging the resources and working at 99% which blows up the machine. I am sure that with effort and collaboration "hence Confluence" we can figure out the appropriate setup that needs to be set up on VM to let everything work. VM environment is great and easy to support.

That seems a bit wordy, but I'd still like to see some additional information covered line:
1. Whether customers have had problems in the past with virtualisation
2. Performance for virtualised databases specifically
3. Does Atlassian test our products under VM?

I second this.

Virtualised environments are sprouting everywhere - we need more information than "not supported". I want to know whether I can take a calculated risk and use VMWare