VMWare, Citrix and JDE

Hi,

We are thinking about converting our current JDE/Citrix environment over to VMWare.

Has anyone run Citrix and JDE on a VM server?

Any information or experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Melissa

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Has anyone run Citrix and JDE on a VM server?

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Yes, but it was a bad experience all around. I don't recommend it...

Hi Melissa,

So far, I had negative comments on JDE performance
running on VMWare.
However, I'd like other people to share their
experiences on this technology.

Three words of advice:

DON'T GO THERE

Vmware is fine and dandy for test. It's livable for a non-production server (like a testing batch server). For anything else, RUN!!!!! Hardware is cheap, avoid vmware for production. Two thumbs down

Gregg

Melissa,

For the record, to date we have tried out vmware for enterprise server. Stunk. Vmware for Deployment server, totally stunk and would not work. Vmware for batch server, slow performance, but livable for a non-production box. Vmware for terminal server - generally not as fast as a physical box, ok for testing or PY. Vmware for fat client, crummy performance.

In production, I have one vmware batch server for the PY and DV environments only. One vm-ware fat client, accessed once or twice a month. vm-ware on two terminal servers, again, only for testing. vmware for enterprise and deployment server never made it to production or even a "sandbox" environment. So in this topic, I literally have been there, done that.

Gregg

Don't do it.

I have 3000 user runing on VMWare ESX.....

okay no I'm kidding. VMWare is just not good here EXCEPT for very small number of users but in these cases why the heck would a company that small be running JDE?

If you want to deploy VMWare in your JDE environment try using it for remote FAT clients or for testing.

Colin

Have anybody used VMWare for development? We are using terminal services for development. It is great so far except that debugger keeps acting up all the time. It is used to work fine in Xe but when we moved to 8.9 it has been acting up.

Thanks
--Sam

I have to be the one 'positive' comment on VMware. We are using VMware successfully in a production environment with no issues what so ever.

There are qualifiers though - this is for a small production system, with few concurrent users, using only the HR module. Although we currently have multiple instances of JDE for supply chain/financials, etc, it was decided (politics) that HR would be contained withen a seperate instance. Due to the way our cost structure is, VMware was 'almost free', so we implemented using that technology.

I am biased to beleive what others have said about VMware and production (don't do it). BUT for small/low concurrent users/low usage, I have not seen any issues...

John

John,

When you posed this same question a fe months back, I said the same thing, run!!! But since you have a tiny little environment that needs to isolated, than that is not a bad application of JDE on VMware. But most instances of JDE are for much more users. In that scenario, vmware is a poor fit.

Gregg

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Due to the way our cost structure is, VMware was 'almost free', so we implemented using that technology.


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John - I think the above quote is the distinguishing factor. To implement VMWare, you really ought to be using VMWare ESX Server. To use that, you need a really BIG box. The cost of VMWare ESX Server is in the $100,000 range - so if its free for you, then great - but its cost prohibitive for other customers.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RUN JDE PRODUCTION ON VMWARE SERVER - this is NOT "ESX".

The performance issues with VMWare aren't to do with the VMWare product - its an awesome product (and its great for development and testing) - but the virtual drive technology provides horrible performance that causes most aspects of a JDE system to slow to a crawl if even a few users are loaded onto it.

HOWEVER

In the future, drive technology and software behind the virtual drive technology will no doubt speed up dramatically. BUT, if you use a SAN with fiber connected 15k RPM drives - its still too slow with the virtual drive technology.

If someone has connected physical drives directly to a VMWare machine - I'd be interested in hearing the results - but I believe the virtual controller is also an issue.

Coming soon, however, are arrays with only solid state drives. Now THAT might certainly change things....

From reading these posts I can't really tell which version of VMWare you may be using. Can you please make sure to include the version for new posts? Is anyone using ESX 3.1 successfully? Were these failures using some other version? What were the specific problems? Did you have local disks configured in separate partitions for each server? Or was it a San? How was it conected? Fiber? Ethernet?

We're currently piloting ESX 3.1 and having some success but some things happening are a little flaky and we are not sure if it is ESX causing this or something else. We made one big disk array to get the max space available. We are running 17 servers on one box. CPU and memory are good but some performance problems do crop up when they get busy and it seems that disk IO may be the bottleneck.

ESX 3.1 cost

ESX 3.1 doesn't cost anywhere near $100,000. You can buy ESX 3.1 Standard with 1 year of support for approximately $4,500 including tax from Dell. And hardware isn't cheap when you need to get lots of processors, disk, RAID, Memory and OSs. So it quickly pays for itself if you use more than a couple servers.

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....but some performance problems do crop up when they get busy and it seems that disk IO may be the bottleneck.

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You just made the case against VMware for production JDE. The JDE enterprise and deployment servers are I/O intensive servers. They need to be seperate, physical boxes for a production instance. Anything short of that (unless you have a teeny tiny system like John's) is asking for performance nightmares down the road. Don't cut corners, buy the hardware...

Few things to consider before you have VM Ware. This technology is not supported by Oracle as of now and I don't know if its in their radar too at this time.
At the colloborate, one of the Oracle said we tried it in our lab and performance was a big conern and we did not pursue it any further.
We belive if you have problem with this technology they will ask you to rip out VM ware and prove the problem in non-VMWARE platform for them to even look at it.

We are still moving all our non-production environments in this direction ( politics)....
I am in middle of project where we are testing F5 switches to load balance Webserver and App server. I continuosly find Bottleneck crerated by processor/Memory problem when we put some load.

My environment have both phsyical box and VM ware box and inspite of assigning one full processor, I keep getting time out errors on the VM ware box. Hence for testing of this project, we are moving back to Phsyical boxes.

As a techniology, I see lot of benefits, however Oracle might need to invest some time and effort to certify this technology. If performance is your conern, I wouldn't venture into technology atleast as of now....

Jaise

VMWare Performance

Bad disk performance is not a charteristic of VMWare. It is more a symptom of the disk & IO subsystems and how you have it configured. If you were to isolate each VM server into it's own disk array, then the problem probably would not exist any more so than in a stand alone server. If you use a SAN then there is also a certain amount of a performance hit just because it isn't local to the PC and it may also be under load from other applications not just JDE.

In our case, we didn't have the resources to segregate everything into it's own array so every disk is in the same array and thus it gets busy and you get a disk bottleneck but let's not go around saying that VMWare can't perform. You have to know what you are doing and what you want in the end when you create the box to get the best performance. It's just like a mainframe, if you don't carve out the proper resources then that partition will perform slowly and bus speeds would have to be fast enough to support the amount of data transferring over it. You can't expect a server that was used to run a standalone server 2003 to run multiples of that without some performance hit. So you may need multiple SCSI cards and disk arrays to have it perform adequately.

Now, having said that, why can't Oracle certify this product running on VMWare? There are plenty of other applications which run well there so what is so darn special about this? Could it be they are not following MS Best practices and do naughty things like bypass APIs and directly access memory and such? What's going on with this product?

OK - I'll throw in a dollar toward 'where' VM can be uses.... Use it on the
Development Boxes - the machines your developers are using. Make sure they
have big bossie machines... then allow them to put all their 'toys' on the
VM and do a snapshot. Then, as they 'break' their machines apart (weekly,
ususally) - they have the snapshot to always unfold to.

HOWEVER - your developer do have to abide by the Safety Rule of SESO - and
to the darn'd SAVE enviornment..

I know a few places where it doesn't work (hi guys) - but my experience has
been different!

(db)




--

I've been reading this thread with great interest as we use VMWare too. So I'll add my AUD 0.02 to the mix.

Firstly, according to our Windows Admin Team, we have one VM Sever and run ESX 3.0.1

We have, in addition to other non-jde "machines", 3 fat clients that are VMWare "machines":

One is our one and only admin "machine" for our production system. Our production system is completely separate from our test/development system and contains only one environment. Our production Deployment Server is not VMWare and is on a dedicated box.

We also have two admin/development "machines" for our test/development system. Our test/development system contains a number of environments. Our test/development Deployment Server is not VMWare and is on a dedicated box.

We connect to the fat clients using windows Remote Desktop Connection and allow only one user to connect to a "machine" at a time. We have a small admin/CNC/Development team. This works well and we have not had any VMWare related problems with any of the fat clients.

We recently moved our Deployment Server to a VM on our ESX box, and other than adding around an hour to a full package build, we have experienced no problems. We will not be trying with application, web or enterprise servers any time soon tho....

Re: VMWare Performance

Our SErver group is looking at moving our B7332 implementation to VMWare and after reading all of the replies/threads on this we are getting worried.

Can anyone out there help us with some stats/experience in moving a B7332 setup running Citrix Terminal Server for clients and Intel for App/Deployment to VMWare?

Andrew.
B7332 SP11, Intel NT4, Oracle 8.1.7, Citrix MF 1.8