What types of JDE servers are being virtualized?

Hello All,
I know there has been plenty of discussion about which servers to virtualize and who is doing what in their production and test environments.

We are planning to migrate our TEST Application and Database server to VM Ware and wanted to poll everyone to see how many people are using VM Ware to virtualize their databases.

So everyone pleaseeee respond !!

Do you use VMVare or other Virtual Technologies instead of PHYSCIAL MACHINES for

Database servers of any flavor - heck no! They need as much horse power as they can get.

Deployment server - we tried that a few years ago in the early days of virtualization, it was a trainwreck. Physical is the way to go.

Terminal servers - PY no big deal, PD is acceptible as long as you don't expect to have as many users on that server as you can get on a physical box. Just multiple the number by .5

Web Server - our XE webservers are pretty underutilized, so PY and PD virtual webservers are working fine.

We talked about a deidcated VM server for OAS when we go to 8.12. We would host the US and Asia on the box since they are on different sides of the clock. For that matter, we could squeeze in Europe since that is offset against my prime hours for North America. I would have to do some additional scaling if we added in South America since the timezones would overlap with North America. On the plus side, if I scaled it for the Americas, Europe and Asia would have terrific performance.

Fat clients - not an issue virtualizing them. Been there, done that for the last 3 years.

- Gregg

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Database servers of any flavor - heck no! They need as much horse power as they can get.


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To be precise, you need a proper physical disk controller since ERP database access is both very chatty and disk intensive. Virtualization isn't ready to handle disk-intensive applications yet - but we're getting close (with iSCSI etc)

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Deployment server - we tried that a few years ago in the early days of virtualization, it was a trainwreck. Physical is the way to go.


[/ QUOTE ]I totally disagree with this. The deployment server is just a Windows fileserver - if you build packages on virtual workstations, there is no reason necessary to keep the deployment server physical. Its not mission critical, and its a "development" server in the eyes of the auditors - so go ahead and virtualize it.

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Terminal servers - PY no big deal, PD is acceptible as long as you don't expect to have as many users on that server as you can get on a physical box. Just multiple the number by .5


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Whats a terminal server ?! JK !!! Actually, putting a citrix box on a virtualized platform is really not a good idea, because citrix is like a virtual platform for the end users. I'd say its pointless, like running a virtual machine inside of a virtual machine - you just end up with performance headaches. I'm not sure the original post asked about citrix/TSE boxes however...

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Web Servers......<clip>


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These work well under Virtualized server. Remember, the only "officially" supported virtual platform is Oracle VM for production - so be very careful about doing this.

I noted that Greg didn't talk about JDE App servers - but those also work excellent virtualized. Again, don't do it for production since Oracle VM is the only "official" virtualized platform for production servers. But both the web and the JDE App servers are mostly CPU or memory intensive - so work very well in a virtualized environment.
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Fat clients - not an issue virtualizing them. Been there, done that for the last 3 years.

- Gregg

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Actually, theres also VDI coming out now, so that option is being refined even more - but I agree with Gregg, fat clients always work well as virtualized machines.

Since Jon picked my post apart, I'll rebut.

We are in agreement on the database server. The disk subsystem is the key. For our prod database server, we have a tier one SAN. It is very fast. For the development side of the cluster, it is on a tier two SAN and the performance is poor during certain operations. During normal operations, things are fine. When we do IO intensive stuff like database refreshes, the performance drops off considerably.

Deployment Server - as I said, we tried this out in the early VM days. We could never get it working and JDE (that's how long ago we tried it) was stumped too. So we kept it physical.

Terminal servers - our production boxes are physical. We have tried out VM for test terminal servers. As long as the VM session is tuned well on a host that isn't too busy, it worked well. I prefer physical, but it will work on VM.

App Server - my prod batch server is physical. I need the CPUs (four) and the fast IO to process the prod load. My test batch server is VM. That works fine since it doesn't have a high load. We just added on another prod batch server for a small group of users. They are remote users (Costa Rica) in seven store fronts. That server is VM. The key for them is not falling behind other jobs. VM is fine for that. We are on XE, so our web server is a pretty small piece, so the Logic App Server component is not an issue.


Ok Mr Steele, your turn.

- Gregg

While VMWare may be the leader in server virtualization; Virtual Server is coming on very strong. Windows 2008 Virtual Server is free and has all the features of VMWare plus you get free Windows OS licenses.

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Windows 2008 Virtual Server is free and has all the features of VMWare plus you get free Windows OS licenses.

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I disagree. Microsoft Virtual Server has some major flaws that is nothing like VMWare - its like trying to compare Windows 98 versus Unix 64Bit.

Maybe MSFT Virtual Server has some of the features of the free VMWare Server - but almost every large IT department in the world doesn't risk their VMWare implementation on "free" software.

Microsoft doesn't have anything that looks like ESX as far as I know - and I believe (and hope) that anyone looking at virtualization is planning on a dedicated host platform such as VMWare ESX or Oracle VM. Microsoft Virtual Server also cannot create a guest OS with more than 1 CPU - therefore is NOT a recommended solution for ANY of the Minimum Technical Requirements for JDE Servers.

A great comparison between the two platforms (although this IS a couple of years old) can be found here :

http://capitalhead.com/articles/benchmarking-vmware-esx-server-25-vs-microsoft-virtual-server-2005-enterprise-edition.aspx

A more recent comparison of Windows 2008 Virtual Server Hyper V vs VMWare 3.5 Infrastructure ESX can be found here :

http://itcomparison.com/Virtualization/MShypervvsvi35/HyperVvsvmware35esx.htm


Sorry, but when Microsoft purchased Virtual PC from Connectix - it was never seriously going to be a competitor to VMWare at all - more like a limited competitor of VMWare Workstation...and, the biggest flaw to me regarding Windows 2008 server is the fact that the Host OS is still susceptible to the viruses, worms and spyware that plague all Windows systems - hence requiring antivirus, antispyware, antiperformance (!)

He should have referred to Hyper-V. The old Virtual Server is roughly equivalent to the VMWare Server (formerly GSX) solution.

Hyper-V, although requiring Windows 2008 Server in order to function, is roughly equivalent to the way Xen works when the machine boots. It does support non Windows operating systems (specifics can be found in the links below).

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-overview.aspx

New with 2008 R2:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-r2.aspx

And I believe this is akin to what he was referring to in regards to the initial cost associated with it:

"To get Microsoft's Hyper-V, all you need to do is to buy an edition of Windows Server 2008. The cost for that is between $999 and $3999. If you use Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition, at a cost of close to $4000, you can run up to 4 guests inside of it without having to buy additional Windows licenses."

Of course, be it VMWare or Hyper-V, the management infrastructure is where they get you. Microsoft is playing nice with VMWare as far as managing ESX hosts from their console, but VMWare is not reciprocating, at least not yet.

Thank you CNC Gurus for providing feedback about Virtual Environments. Hopefully we will be able to convince our network engineers to let our test Database server remain as a physical server.

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Thank you CNC Gurus for providing feedback about Virtual Environments. Hopefully we will be able to convince our network engineers to let our test Database server remain as a physical server.

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ah ha! That's additional information. It's your non-JDE infrastructure guys pushing for the P to V on your database server? Our infrastructure guys were like that too. Once they got the "VM-Ware Religion" they were quite zelous for a year or so thinking that everything could be virtualized. Hold your ground, the database server is not a good fit for virtualization, even if it's a development box.

- Gregg

Ay one client the Infrastructure guys wanted to know why we could not
install OS/400 on the VM.
Barb Kramarski


In a message dated 6/2/2009 4:44:20 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
[email protected] writes:


Quote:

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ah ha! That's additional information. It's your non-JDE infrastructure guys pushing for the P to V on your database server?

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OOps - used a term that not everyone knows. P to V is the acronym for Physical to Virtual. That is taking a physical box and converting it to a VM-Session.

- Gregg

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Ay one client the Infrastructure guys wanted to know why we could not install OS/400 on the VM.

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Those are the kinds of emails I keep. Its called ammunition.

Hello,

In our production platform, all the servers are virtualized with VMWare, except the database server.
We use 2 VMWare ESX servers on which are distribued our 2 entreprise servers, 2 JAS servers, Deployment Server, E-generator, and some other VM.
The database server is the only Physical server.

cm: thanks for filling in the details for altquark. I missed his update.

Attached is a good doc on the new technical advantages of Hyper-V. Save the doc with a .docx extension.

I attached, in my earlier post, two documents - one was VMWare server vs Virtual Server (the older version) - the other was ESX vs HyperV. I think the comparison speaks for itself.

I'm not sure where VM is going to go. I do know that Oracle mucked everything up when they "introduced" Oracle VM (Xen), but realistically the competition is between Microsoft and EMC. Right now, EMC is certainly winning the battle due to the large number of ESX Servers out there and because technically they've certainly been much more advanced than other technologies - but in the long run, Microsoft has the ability and the resources to overtake EMC now that they have their own "dedicated OS" - even though its windows still !

I'd expect to see Microsoft take over the lead in about 4 or 5 years. EMC has to come up with a huge performance increase or value proposition before then to keep ahead.

I think that fundamentally this is in Intel's hands - the VT support they recently introduced has proved to be inferior to software-only virtualisation in many instances, so we have to wait and see what VT2 would bring us ;-)

As I posted before, try running this tool:
http://www.everestsoftint.com/files/ESIBenchmark4VM.exe
on the host vs. on the VM and see the difference for yourself. I wouldn't be surprised if MS VM scored a few times slower than VMWare's on this test. This tool also prints an interesting URL to a VMWare doc on this topic...