Hi,

We currently use SuperContainer on a Mac Mini, hosting 2TB worth of data for use across our business (mainly images, pdfs, .ai's) which seems to perform well.  Now we're looking to move SC to a virtualised environment.  I'd like to know what others are carrying out here and if there is a optimal setup:

Options available to us:

1.  Host SC on Windows VM on our on-premise virtualised infrastructure.  But I believe if we do this, we'll loose functionality around displaying thumbnails of pdfs and .ai's - something we rely heavily on, unless anyone is aware of a workaround here?
2.  Look at using SC in the Cloud on a dedicated OS X server (needing at least 2TB of storage may prove costly here).  Have people noticed an issue with performance when moving down this route?
3. Keep the physical mac, but move the SC data folders to a Windows environment (that is readily backed up etc) - although not sure if this is possible with SC and if performance is any good.  We'd then look to configure a cold stanby machine ready to bring up if the primary machine failed.
4. Look for an alternative to SuperContainer that is Windows based and offers the same or greater level of functionality (but I don't think this exists).

Many thanks for any feedback you all have in this area.

Simon

 

Hi Simon,

1. If you move SC to a Windows environment, SuperContainer will indeed lose the ability to generate thumbnails for .pdfs and .ai files. There is not really a workaround for this as SuperContainer uses a Mac only image library to accomplish this and there is not a Windows alternative. 

2. We do something similar to this for our internal SuperContainer but it is not a cloud server but rather we have a server at a colocation that runs a virtual OS X machine with SuperContainer installed. You may be able to run some kind of VM software on a Windows instance that runs OS X. You may be able to do the same in your on-premise infrastructure mentioned in number 1. Additionally, AWS now offers Mac EC2 instances but they are pretty pricey still in my opinion. 

3. SuperContainer can be configured with networked drives although I have never tested running SuperContainer on a Mac and then having the storage drive be a Windows drive. This probably won't work due to differences in file paths/file systems between the two operating systems.

4. There is probably something out there but I am not aware of an alternative that is similar to SuperContainer

Please let us know if you have any questions!

 

Many thanks for your feedback Ryan, 

I think we'll initially look at option 2 and see if we can trial it in some fashion first (or get it onto our on prem hosts).

Kind regards

Simon