E1 on Azure

Adrian_Chimirel

Adrian_Chimirel

Legendary Poster
Hi,

Is there anybody available to share their experience with their E1 on Azure?
We are mostly interested in:
- how happy are you with it
- do you consider moving away/back
- how long were you on Azure
- how long did it take to migrate from your previous platform to Microsoft's Cloud
- what are the first three pros
- what are the first three cons
Any other relevant hints, tips, do and don't do

Thank you,
 
No experience to offer but will am fascinated to hear other's experiences ...
 
Hi Adrian,

I have one customer that is currently upgrading from 9.1 to 9.2 and in the process also moving from their existing hosting provider to Azure. This is a Windows / SQL environment , so everything has been pretty straightforward. So far no issues with Azure , but it is still too early to tell. Some general points that may be of use

- Since their data footprint was not all that big , they went with premium storage(SSD) on Azure for everything . If you cannot do it for everything , at least do it for the Production DBs.
- make sure the storage and VMs are in the same region.
- if you have multiple web servers or enterprise servers you can group them in the same availability sets
- go with a parallel system approach if possible , rather than a lift and shift
- we were able to use the Azure load balancer for load balancing the E1 JVMs. It does not have advanced capabilities like an F5 , but F5 has a LB as a service in Azure.

Will update with any other relevant info as the project progresses.
 
Last edited:
Hi

We have ran it for 2yrs now with no issues. We didn't use premium disk for anything if you use storage spaces for the disks and create virtual disks you can easily provide the IOPS required.

Happy to answer any questions

JT
 
Hi i_c,

Thank you for sharing your current experience with Azure. I'm sorry to reply so late; after the first two weeks of silence I almost lost faith in JDE List.
Our SQL Wintel environment footprint is not big, either (around 250 GB for our Production db, max 100 concurrent users at month end), we are looking into the premium storage, too (the difference in price is less than 20%).
We will be able to save A LOT in hardware, therefore we will be able to out-muscle the existing horsepower, mind my saying 'bigly'.
Currently we have one Production Web Server and we consider using two instances in Azure.
We'll stick to using the parallel approach, as we did on every upgrade (and we had two upgrades, from 8.10 to 9.1 in the last ten years).

My questions are:
- how long did it take to create the E1 9.2 ready_for_retrofit in Azure, including all servers & development workstations?
- how long did it take to retrofit the how many vanilla objects? We have around 100 vanilla objects (of all types from table & business functions to applications and UBEs.
- how many data refreshes from 9.1 to 9.2 did you do?

Thank you, again,
 
Hi JT,

Firstly, thank you very much for your feedback.
My questions are:
- how long did it take to create the E1 9.2 ready_for_retrofit in Azure, including all servers & development workstations?
- how long did it take to retrofit the how many vanilla objects? We have around 100 vanilla objects (of all types from table & business functions to applications and UBEs.
- how many data refreshes from 9.1 to 9.2 did you do?
I would appreciate you answering them ... 'bigly'!

Thank you very much,
 
HI Adrian,

Answers to your questions below , though I must say that Azure really does not make a difference here in these questions. These are more general upgrade project timeline questions. Once you have the servers provisioned and ready for use , they would be like any other VM , whether on premise , co-located or third party hosted.

My questions are:
- how long did it take to create the E1 9.2 ready_for_retrofit in Azure, including all servers & development workstations?
-- about 3 weeks (120 hours)

- how long did it take to retrofit the how many vanilla objects? We have around 100 vanilla objects (of all types from table & business functions to applications and UBEs.

-- So Azure would not really have impact here. It depends on the complexity of your customizations. The retrofit effort would not change because the system is on Azure. Since you have gone through two upgrades previously , what ever numbers you have from your last upgrade should hold good unless you have added a significant number of mods after you went live with 9.1. In fact it should be less since you are going from 9.1 to 9.2 and if you choose to execute it as a Simplified Upgrade

- how many data refreshes from 9.1 to 9.2 did you do?

-- depends on your Upgrade project and testing plan. But typically 1 initial , at least 2 during testing and then may be 1 mock go live and then the final go live
 
Thank you very much for your precious details!

It seems we will take the Only Tools Release 9.2 approach, for the time being.

Will keep you all, up to date, if anyone is interested.
 
How did the project end up going? All good to go? I'm curious why you chose Azure. We are staying on AWS even though the cost is high until there is enough proof they can hang with them.

Thanks,
Cory
 
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