8.12 8.97 SQL 2005 64bit

Is it a good thing to virtualize any of the E1 servers?
Or should we limit the virtualization to the Fat Clients / Developer only?
What is your experience about VMWare & E1?
Thank you,

Hi,

I had a couple of experiences with VMWare.
In my humble opinion and according to my modest experience,
I don't recommend virtualizing (at least with VMWare)
your Production Enterprise and Production JAS servers,
but Deployment and Development UBE/DB servers work
reasonably well on a VMWare environment.
Disk and network drivers have a very noticeable impact
on your VMWare environment; anyway, I was a bit deceived
of E1 production performance on a VMWare environment.
As I said, I haven't tested E1 on ESX or Zen or other
virtualizing platforms.
Have a nice day, spring is finally arriving to Canada!

You should never use VMWare on any of the servers, unless you're testing or developing with it.

VMWare is very cool technology - but disk access is horribly slow. I use VMWare every day now I have a MacBook Pro - I have VMWare fusion running my XP machine on my desktop - and its very nifty. I have setups of OAS JAS servers, App Servers - all sorts of JDE servers - but even with ESX disk performance is never as fast with a virtual software controller compared to an actual physical machine.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

I've heard of Big-5 consulting practices actually putting JDE customers on VMWare virtualization platforms - and then the customer complains bitterly about performance. Thats lawsuit territory if you ask me. Certainly, try it out, play with it - but you'll find performance sucks big time, and you'll end up returning to physical boxes for app servers and database servers.

I have used VM ware on Development web servers without any issues, they are a bit slower but for development that does not really matter. Currently I am using the Windows Virtual Server and it is really, really slow, I have an 8.97 instance running in Development and wow, it is so slow. The Microsoft Virtual Server can only use 100 mbps where as VM can utilize 1GB network bandwidth so I think that may be causing some of my issues.

But I agree you should not use any type of virtual servers in a production environment.

We'll let virtualization mature.
Who knows, with new technologies such as solid state hard drives, multiple GB network bandwidth ... give it a couple of years, and we'll live in interesting times.
Thank you all!
You're right Sebastian, spring is finally arriving to Canada!

Yes. Solid State Disk is absolutely the way of the future - and will be the determining factor with virtualization of chatty applications such as database servers, ERP etc.

Right now, I know many companies who have virtualized their "microsoft" server technologies - such as exchange, file services, active directory etc - and they have found huge financial benefits in doing this (as well as other reasons) - but until VMWare can cope with extremely chatty applications (lots of IO) then we will still need "physical" hardware for those systems.

My estimate is 5 years from now. Expect to be virtualizing your entire ERP infrastructure in about 2013 or so (just as Xe support finishes !)