FMS 12 on a virtual machine

[El_Pablo]

We are planning to migrate to Filemaker 12 in the following weeks. FMS 11 is already running on a mac mini server which is working well. That's its only task.

Lately we purchase a real server from HP with fast 15krpm HDDs (raid-5), dual CPU, plenty of memory, etc. The server is used as a virtual host using Hyper-V. We have a couple questions :

• Will it be faster to serve Filemaker from the new server or leave it on the mac mini?
  
• Can FM server run on SBS 2008?
  
  • We will virtualize the OS.
    

  [*]Is it better to run on SBS or Windows 7 Pro?

  • It won't run any service except Filemaker Server
    

  [*]If we keep the Mac Mini, how can we make it faster?

  • Change the HDD, NAS on gigabit switch, ...?
    

Thanks for your help!

[Wim Decorte]

Faster: impossible to answer. Depends on the design of your solution, the other load that you will put on the physical host for the virtual machines,...

SBS is not a supported OS but you can make FMS run on it. It is likely to put you outside of FMI support parameters so I would advise against it.

RAID5: not ideal for a database server. Raid 1+0 is better. Not sure how the Raid 5 for the VM host will translate in performance issies for its virtual guests.

NAS: that's a no-no. Certainly if you were thinking of putting the live files somewhere on the NAS. NAS works through OS-level sharing and is fragile. If you want speed go with an SSD. Or a fibre-channel SAN with plenty of redundancy.

[NINU]

WILL THE EXE RUNTIME SOLUTION RUN ON ORGANIZTION SERVER WITHOUT USING FILEMAKER PRO SERVER

[Wim Decorte]

Hi Ninu,

When you have a question, start a new topic otherwise users may not see your question (you've made it part of an old topic). Also, don't write in all caps if you will.

To answer your question: no. A runtime is for a single user. It can not be shared or used as a server/

[John May - Point In Space]

Thumbs up to all of Wim's suggestions. Raid 10 and FibreChannel SANs are what we use here, and work great for FileMaker Server deployments. SAS drives too - no SATA.