As you know, CA is continually striving to meet our clients diverse and ever changing needs. CA products support and manage many of today's leading platforms, operating systems and applications across the IT enterprise.

Many of our clients run applications and operating systems under VMware. CA also makes extensive use of VMware within its development and support organizations to create various Windows and Linux environments. CA notes any specific issues it detects in product readme files. However, it is important to note that CA does not attempt to QA every possible setup of its products with VMware and cannot certify specific client configurations.

In order to facilitate a quick resolution and root cause to any potential product issue encountered under VMware, CA would like to establish some basic guidelines for supporting its software in a VMware environment:

• In general, only the current GA version of VMware and the prior major version of VMware are supported. Any exceptions will be noted in product readme files. Some CA products may note specific VMware versions in compatibility matrices.
  
  
• All versions and configurations of applications and operating systems (kernels included) running under VMware must already be certified for the CA product version the client is running. If you need to check a product's Compatibility Matrix, visit the https://support.ca.com Web Site.
  
  
• The client is responsible for properly configuring their virtual machine and applications for VMware.
  


• The client should review this document http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/en-us prior to installing the CA product.
  


• While CA does not insist that clients recreate each issue without VMware before contacting support, we reserve the right to request the client diagnose and troubleshoot specific issues without the VMware "variable". This will only be done where we have reason to believe the issue is directly related to VMware.
  


• While functional problems have proven to be rare under VMWare, problems related to performance and capacity are much more commonly reported, particularly with enterprise-class applications that recommend highly configured, dedicated systems for deployment. Diagnosis of this class of problem is likely to require the client to disable other applications and virtualized operating system instances which are competing for physical system resources, and possibly to remove the virtualized environment altogether.
  
  
• In the event that CA support cannot directly identify the root cause as a CA or VMware issue, Support would ask the client to open a support issue with VMware and any other necessary 3rd party vendors to expedite the resolution of the issue. At that point, CA, VMware, and the client will work together toward a quick resolution. CA and VMware both belong to the Technical Support Alliance Network - www.tsanet.org

As stated above, any known issues running a specific product with VMware are covered in the product's readme file.