Last time I checked, the official stance from what was then IBM is that virtual environments other than VMWare were not supported, and even then, any DB issues that you ran into while running under VMWare would need to be fully replicated in a physical environment before support would be provided. As a result we took a policy of not supporting virtual for any of our end-users, and strongly pushed them all to remain on physical.
In most cases where they still went ahead and installed on virtual, all appeared to be fine initially and would run perfectly "fine" for a period of a few months before performance would degrade over time to the point where the our clients complained it was unacceptable, at which point we would get them to switch back to physical. Having said all that, when configured properly, it *does* work.. The key points to follow will be the same as virtualizing something like Exchange/SQL Server where your IO requirements need special consideration. Stay away from dynamic virtual disks, use pass-through disks or iSCSI targets if possible, or worst case use a fixed/static disk image for the best IO performance. File sizing and fragmentation can leave you dead in the water so be sure to have processes to monitor these and keep everything as optimal as possible. I personally found a number of IO performance bottlenecks in our application while troubleshooting virtual servers with tools like Sysinternals Filemon, where seeking IO within files is quite obvious due to the repeated access to the same file but at sequential addresses.. Once we got a handle on the file sizing, and some of the code was cleaned up, performance was reasonable, and has remained as such for more than the normal "few months"... As an aside, with SB+ on virtual, we found a major bottleneck with the way the TUXFER.DATA.% port files are created/cleared on use. For some reason in a virtual environment, the CLEAR-FILE on a static UDT file can take a considerable time to complete, so transfers to Excel would pause for a significant time before initiating. We solved this by pre-creating a fixed number of TUXFER.DATA.% files (250 in our case) as dynamic files.. This not only solved owner and general windows permission issues (Error 202 etc) but meant that the clear down was near instantaneous for the SB processing.. FYI all of this was with UniData on Windows, I suspect UniData on Linux in virtual would be considerably better due to how shared memory works under Linux as compared to Windows... HTH Ray -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin King Sent: 26 January 2010 17:32 To: U2 Users List Subject: [U2] Unidata on Virtualized Server Is anyone running Unidata (+ SB+) on a virtualized server, i.e. VMWare? If so, what considerations and concerns are there in this environment that are different from a dedicated Unidata server? (Yes, I searched the archive and didn't find anything that recent, so my apologies for asking a question that has been asked before.) -Kevin http://www.PrecisOnline.com _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
