RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 on VMware

August 15th, 2008

I had to install and configure RSA Authentication Manager 7.1. Looking at the Supported Platforms I couldn’t find VMware ESX as supported platform. VMware ESX was supported for RSA AU6.1. So I thought by myself, let’s give it a try. What I noticed first was the size of the installer. The installation file for RSA AM 7.1 is about 2.5Gb, which I think is a lot compared to the 300Mb for RSA AM 6.1.

I installed a server with the following specs:

2 x Intel Xeon 2.0 Ghz processor
2Gb of RAM
60 Gb partition, solely for RSA
2Gb Paging file

The installation of RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 took 1,5 hours to install, so I really started doubting the installation under VMware. After the installation I wasn’t able to open the management console, which runs webbased in this new version. To be sure, I restarted the server after the installation. Now it took 45 minutes to pass the Applying computer settings and Applying personal settings.

I called RSA and the engineer told me that there are no known issues for running RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 under VMware. The only important thing he told me was the usage of 4Gb RAM and a 4GB Paging file, when running under VMware. I upgraded the memory from 2Gb RAM to 4GB RAM and I configured two 4Gb paging files.

You maybe already guess the following lines of text, but the upgrade didn’t work out. The boot process still took approximately 45 minutes. After booting the server, the performance was really bad. The memory usage was steadily running on 4.2 Gb!!!!

I called RSA a second time and the next engineer took my doubts away. The told that RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 is NOT OFFICIALE supported by RSA. The performance problems are probably caused by the new Oracle database and the different Java instances, which are running on the server. Because RSA had to run in a virtual environment, I downloaded RSA AM 6.1. The installation AND configuration of the complete environment took about 2 hours.

So at the time of writing this blog post:

DO NOT INSTALL RSA AUTHENTICATION MANAGER 7.1 UNDER VMWARE!!!!

ADD ON August 15th 2009

RSA 7.1 is now supported under ESX 3.5. Check the updated article on this matter.

Maybe you also want to check this article about configuring On-Demand with RSA 7.1.

2 Responses to “RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 on VMware”

Tom Rowan Says:

June 2nd, 2010 at 9:02 am
Hey there! I had the same kind of issues and we also went back to 6.1 for my client. I’ve got another install to do soon -> have you had any further success?
René Jorissen Says:

June 6th, 2010 at 11:34 am
Lately I installed multiple RSA 7.1 servers under VMware 3.5 and 4. I always install SP3 and everything is working perfectly. The performance is relatively good.

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