Virtual Servers

[DarrylO]

Does anyone have any experience running FMSA (7.0v3) on a virtual server? My company is standardizing on VMWare and will not authorize dedicated machines as servers. I've got a fairly small solution (3.5MB/3000 records/7 users) and I'm wondering if there is anything out of the ordinary I should expect.

[Søren Dyhr]

I've considered this as well, but never been giving it a stab!!!

Bill Heizer from FM Inc. mentioned this in his speech at Devcon this year ...and I heard him saying that he'd rather see that than using two Mac Minis. What you should think of is the sharing of the NIC and access time to the harddisk ...which all has to do with the number of users using the solution.

RAID Level 1+5 should be used ...now 7 users is not a lot. But Win2K or 2003 is going to be used for the FMSA ...which perhaps then could require the (user)operating system XP pro or such to be hoovered for eyecandy and ridiculous services in order not to hog unessearily resources. As well as the operating system that runs Vmware, better be kernel compiled linux...

But such tunings takes forever, and people that can do such trickery never come as cheap as they say... so being penny-wise might prove pound-foolish. Crashes in in one of the virtual sections is stated from VMWare never to influence the neighbouring ....I need to see that before believing and what about kernel panic in the underlaying OS??

Somehow is only the mirror of his site up at present, but Blackviper has a thoroughly examination of all running services in XPpro and Win2K so you with som spit and polish can tune each of the two operating systems to be tailored to the purpose they were ment for:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041123023227/www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

--sd

[DarrylO]

I should probably clarify a few things:

1) Deploying FMSA on VMWare is not my choice. I work at a fairly large telecom company and was able to get this solution approved as an exception to the IT policy. I support the solution and IT supports the hardware.

2) The solution is not completely up and running, but I've noticed a couple of things I can't explain. Since the virtual server is the only part of the setup with which I have no experience, I'm wondering how a typical VMWare issue might manifest itself.

3) The VMWare machine is running Windows Server 2003 (5.2.3790). I'm running Windows 2000 (5.00.2195 SP4).