VMware, Production Users?

I found threads discussing VMware, but they were a bit dated (2004 or so). Is anyone using VMware with E1 8.11/8.12 today? Using it in a production environment? Anyone using the new version of VMware (3.0)?
My department is seriously considering it, as we have a readily available enterprise VMware farm (multiple beefy physical servers) that are very appealing. Also to note is that our use of E1 will be for very small install (approx. 40 concurrent users) and 50-200 UBEs/day..
Opinions or recent real-world experiences would be appreciated.

-John

I have a couple clients using it with 8.11, but it is for the development machines only. With 8.11, it is all web for the users.

Yes, I am aware of the web-only aspect for the clients. I am talking about using VMware for all of the production web servers (except for DB)..

-John

Don't DO IT !

VMWare is an awesome product - I helped introduce customers to it a long time back, in fact I used a beta version of VMWare just prior to leaving JDE in 2000. I love VMWare - I use it above the Microsoft product, and I have lots of lovely testing machines to run VMWare sessions and to "play" with in my big sandbox.

BUT

I do recall there are customers thinking they can use VMWare to run production servers. Don't think you can do this - the obvious fact is that JDE will cut off support in an instant if they found you were using VMWare "virtual" servers - but there are other reasons not to do this.

The biggest and only real reason is due to hard disk access and other hardware resources. Even with the use of VMWare ESX Server which has a narrower gap than GSX to communicate to the HAL, the virtual servers use "packaged" files for hard disk access - and do not have the ability to write directly past the OS to the drive. In effect, you're trying to queue up disk access through a straw - which works for low disk utilization, but try and do it in a production environment, and you'll end up tearing out your follicles while fighting off nasty users.

VMWare will have the same issues with network connectivity as well - the virtual machines will never be able to cope with loads anywhere near the equivalent user loads on a native machine - and in fact the factors of difference mean that you will end up hitting resource limits and performance issues very early on. Trust me, you cannot run the same number of production users on VMWare servers.

The other reason is cost - The cost for VMWare ESX is prohibitive in comparison to purchasing the equivalent hardware. Why pay $100,000 for an 8-way server with lots of memory and a VMWare ESX server license, where you can buy 4 dual processor servers and get more users on them for $40,000 ?

I spoke to a "notable" (ha !) Big 5 company not that long ago about this. A customer called me up wondering why the performance of oneworld was dog-slow - and I discovered that the Big-5 company had spread their entire enterprise on a VMWare ESX server. I looked into it, and worked out how much this Big-5 company had spent on the hardware and explained to the customer that not only were they unsupported by JDE but that the hardware they have had to purchase was exponentially more expensive than if they had bought native hardware, and that the hardware would NEVER be able to perform anywhere near as quick as if it were running natively.

The customer got pretty mad at the Big-5 company, and the Big-5 company tried to defend its decision by attempting to smear my experience and reputation (even though this Big-5 company was very little known in JDE circles !). After I managed to get a senior JDE developer on the phone to talk with the customer, the customer decided to "review" the Big-5 relationship....!

BUT

For testing and development purposes, I love VMWare and use it daily !

Well said Jon. Our infrastructure guys keep trying to cram vm-ware down our throats. For test servers I can put up with the crappy performance. So far we have held the line on production servers. I have tested pretty much everything JDE on vm-ware, deployment servers, enterprise servers, terminal servers, web servers and fat clients. The deployment server was a complete bust, the enterprise server was a dog and shut down. I have one logic server server running on vm-ware, it is slow, but it doesn't need fast IO for supporting PY. I have a couple of vm-ware terminal servers, they do not perform well. I have one vm-ware websphere server under construction, that doesn't look promising. If you're setting up a test system, vm-ware is good. For production, go with the real deal.

Gregg Larkin
Praxair North American System Admin
JDE CNC and Security, Websphere, Tidal, Princeton Softech

To play devil's advocate:

How about for a low-utilization, IE low transaction counts (HR system)? The deployment and DB servers will remain as 'hardware' servers, so it would only be the APP/Batch/Web servers going to VMware.

Also, although VMware will obviously add a layer to slow the system some, isn't the amount of speed lost really dependant upon how the system is sliced up? For example, a 4-way dual 2 core, sliced 2-ways is not going to have a performance hit a dual pentium 4 will have sliced two ways..
As for cost - my company has a VMware farm already set-up, you just state the amount of disk space and # CPUs that you require and it is setup. If more hardware is required for the farm, it is purchased by 'the company' - Due to the way it is costed, it would require basically nothing out of our department's budget, versus a capital expense purchase(s) for new hardware - so cost if not a consideration.
Lastly, it has been posted on customer connection that VMware is fully supported (how far I don't know), on a JDE system. I can dig up the issue #.

-John

[ QUOTE ]
To play devil's advocate:

How about for a low-utilization, IE low transaction counts (HR system)? The deployment and DB servers will remain as 'hardware' servers, so it would only be the APP/Batch/Web servers going to VMware.

[/ QUOTE ]

App/batch/web will work on vm-ware as per my previous post. You just have to put up with crappy performance and another "throat to choke" if, when, things get weird. Have Mary Kay sell a few more cases of blush and buy a few less pink cadilliacs and let you get some real servers John!

Just say NO !

ok - for some really really low transaction thing that you're not too concerned about for reliability (hey, doesn't this sound like a test system) - then what the hey - go for it (but don't write me if it all goes belly up !). I'm saying that starts off as "hey its only a spreadsheet for tracking a few items" turns into a monster-erp system - so if you give the users/finance people an inch, it'll become a freeway.

Performance isn't linear based on machine CPU's being carved up etc etc - in fact, the CPU Utilization is actually very good on a VMWare server - I have tested VMWare virtual machines, and they run within 90% of the host machine - so there is actually very little loss when it comes to CPU Utilization.

I'm referring to everything else. Remember, hard drives and network cards under VMWare are "virtual" - that really means Software based, not hardware based, and there are several FACTORS difference between how a software-emulated NIC performs against a PCI-connected Front Side Bus.

The easiest comparison is imagine how fast a computers front side bus operates - what, about 400MHz ? 600MHz ? A software-based bus operates in the 40-60MHz range as a comparison due to the number of instructions and the layers it has to deal with (I might be under/overestimating, but I'm trying to simply explain how this works).

Accessing a hardware drive therefore takes 9ms, and under a "Virtual" drive, expect something more like 90ms. Sounds fine and dandy - who can measure 90ms - but its all LATENCY, and when you start queuing up 1,000 requests to the drive (which is NOTHING) instead of taking 9 seconds of drive seek-time, it takes 90 seconds !

As for the customer connection article - I've never seen an article that makes that claim - but I'm very open to hearing if such an article exists - so please, please find it. I think JDE shoots themselves in the freaking foot 90% of the time by claiming "support" for this and that - we're all still waiting for SQL 2005 to be supported, and its almost freaking 2007 !

If VMWare is being supported - I promise I'll write a whitepaper that will help people set up VMWare servers for performance. But I'd have to see an article from JDE claiming they actually support it before I put my time into such an article. (Thats' me saying I'll eat my hat if you can produce an article !!!!!)

I'm a VCP (VMWare Certified Profssional) on ESX and Virtual Centre. I love VMWare and have lots of experience on it but..........

that being said I'd never use it for JDEdwards Enterprise, presentation (Citrix, WAS, OAS) or database servers except for a testing environment. You might have some luck with the deployment server but I'd do a P to V after you finish the upgrade for this machine.

If you do however decide to do VMWare I'd make sure that you have multiple physical machines and don't put on the VM's on the same box. You can configure VMotion to move the VM's based on load so eventually you'd get to a happy medium.

VMWare work best for DRP, file servers, DNS, Active Directory, print servers and all those other Windows Domain servers that basically sit idle and don't really "peak".

Most of the JDE servers at some point will "peak" and will require 2 x SMP or more and last time I checked VMWare only supports 2 x SMP.

Even if you do put JDE on VMWare you'll have to configure the JDE VM's with so many shares or RAM and CPU that the other apps will just choke.



Colin

Colin,

Thanks for your perspective. I am going to hang on to your and Jon's post and pull them out the next time infrastructure tries to hype JDE on vmware. I find it VERY interesting that a certified expert on vmware and one of the top pundets on the list is speaking against jde on vmware. By the way, LOVE the Chuck Norris quote in your signiture!

Gregg Larkin
Praxair North American System Admin
JDE CNC and Security, Websphere, Tidal, Princeton Softech