vFabric GemFire Native Client Supported Configurations

The vFabric GemFire native client provides access for C++ and Microsoft® .NET™ clients to the GemFire distributed system. It operates on platforms running Microsoft Windows, Linux (Intel), and Sun Solaris.

Operating system requirements are listed in the chart below:

Operating System	RAM	Swap Space	32-Bit Disk Space Required	64-Bit Disk Space Required
Solaris 9	2GB	256MB	73MB	81MB
Solaris 10	2GB	256MB	73MB	81MB
RHEL 5	2GB	256MB	100MB	114MB
RHEL 6	2GB	256MB	100MB	114MB
SLES 10**	2GB	256MB	100MB	114MB
Windows 2008 Server R1**	2GB	256MB	102MB	114MB
Windows 2008 Server R2	2GB	256MB	102MB	114MB
Windows 7 Enterprise	2GB	256MB	102MB	114MB

**Indicates operating systems that were not tested during standalone vFabric GemFire product testing.

Windows Support Details

The vFabric GemFire native client is built and tested on Windows 7 Enterprise.

The native client is not supported on Windows NT 4.0.

.NET Framework Version Support

The vFabric GemFire native client is supported with Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 and 4.0.

A Microsoft .NET Framework must be installed to support the C++/CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) library for the native client.

Note: You can download the .NET Framework Redistributable Package (x86 for 32-bit or x64 for 64-bit) for the version you wish to use from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads. If it isn’t listed on the Download Center page, use the Search tool to search for ".NET Framework".

The vFabric GemFire native client 7.0 now supports .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 (for compiling C++ applications on Windows). For advantages and more information on the features of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 SP1, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd831853(v=vs.100).aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/w0x726c2(v=vs.100).aspx.

Linux

The vFabric GemFire native client is built on Red Hat Enterprise ES 3, kernel version 2.4.21-47.EL.

The native client is tested on the following Linux versions:

Red Hat Enterprise 5 release 5 (Tikanga), kernel version 2.6.18-8.EL5
Red Hat Enterprise 6, kernel version 2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64

If you are not sure of the kernel version on your system, use this command to list it:

prompt> uname -r

The following table lists the RPM package dependencies for several Linux distributions. The i386 or i686 after the package name indicates that you must install the package for that particular architecture regardless of the native operating system architecture. All of the packages listed are available with the default media for each distribution.

Table 1. GemFire Dependencies on Linux RPM Packages
Linux Version	glibc	libgcc
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (i686)	glibc	libgcc
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 x86 (64-bit)	glibc (i686)	libgcc (i386)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6 (i686)	glibc	glibc
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6 x86 (64-bit)	glibc (i686)	ibgcc (i386)

For versions of Linux not listed in the table, you can verify that you meet the native client dependencies at the library level by using the ldd tool and entering this command:

prompt> ldd $GFCPP/lib/libgfcppcache.so

This step assumes you have already installed the native client and have set the GFCPP environment variable to productDir, where productDir represents the location of the NativeClient_xxxx_bnnnnn directory (xxxx is the four-digit product version and bnnnnn is the product build number).

The following libraries are external dependencies of the native library, libgfcppcache.so. Verify that the ldd tool output includes all of these:

libdl.so.2
libm.so.6
libpthread.so.0
libc.so.6
libz.so.1

For details on the ldd tool, see its Linux online man page.

Solaris

The vFabric GemFire native client is supported on the following Solaris versions:

Solaris 9 kernel update 118558-38
Solaris 10 kernel update 118833-24

Running vFabric GemFire Native Client on vSphere

Without tuning, the vFabric GemFire native client can suffer a performance drop in virtual environments, including the VMware vSphere virtual platform. Without correct tuning, you can expect to see significant performance degradation when running the GemFire native client on vSphere versus running GemFire on dedicated hardware.

We recommend that you tune your GemFire native client on vSphere deployments using the same guidelines published for vFabric GemFire.

See Improving GemFire Performance on vSphere for a list of guidelines and recommendations.

vFabric GemFire native client has been certified and tested on vSphere 5.0.