Macola Progression in a Virtual Environment ? 1

[NeWTRoG]

My understanding is that Progression is currently NOT supported in a virtual environment and furthermore there is no time frame as to when it will be supported.

Be that as it may is anyone out there running Macola Progression on a Vitual Server?

If so what are the problems / challenges (if any)?

 

[dgillz]

I know tons of people doing this. Frankly I didn't know it was not supported. I've never had a problem.

Software Sales, Training, Implementation and Support for Macola, Synergy, and Crystal Reports. Check out our Macola tools:

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[NeWTRoG]

Thanks for the response Don.

I was sure that many people would indeed be running Macola on Virtual Machines.

The "official" response that I got was that it "theoretically should work but was not supported at this time" - a sort of a get out of jail free answer .

Thanks again for taking the time to respond - appreciate it.

 

[NEmacGuy]

Biggest issue, is don't try to get a small horse to do a big job. Not much different than a Physical Machine. We have a few large accounts that have Virtualized their SQL servers.
You should use :
-Lots of memory (Hey its cheap - we have setup systems with 32gig. ram)
-Hard Drive System - Virtual Machine files are on a SAN
-Good Switch the physical server has 8 network adaptors, and the switch connects the Server to the SAN with a fat pipe.

The SAN is Hosting 6 Virtuals Server including SQL, Exchange, 1 of AD Controllers, Intranet Server.

The bottle necks for virtual machines are about the same as they are for SQL servers, you want good drives to read and write data quickly. Go for as many sindles as you can afford. You want to feed as much ram as you can.
Hypervisors are better than virtual server running on a Host OS.

 

[stravis]

On the issue of virtualizing SQL Server; even Microsoft says don't do this except for testing and development purposes. The performance degradation of SQL Server is poor on a virtual server, as the primary factor for determining base speed in SQL Server is IO, not memory or CPU. The amount of memory and CPU speed define the speed of SQL Server after you start adding additional clients and processes. Virtualization, especially using Microsoft's virtualization products, slows down IO and therefore your base speed is going to be a problem even with one user.

If face with the decision of creating the monster machine for virtualization including SQL Server or a big machine for virtualization and a small machine with good IO for SQL Server, choose the latter. To make SQL Server whirl and have decent fail over, all you need is fast disks, RAID 1, 2 NICs, modern multicore processor, and enough memory to take load of number of users. Of course this is generalized and may need to up-sized in high utilization environments. However 99% of Macola client's are not high utilization environments.

All that said, yes you can make it work in a virtual environment. Nothing is going to explode and you may be perfectly happy. Microsoft doesn't suggest it for production boxes because they don't want unhappy customers and Macola won't support it because they know what Microsoft says. Running any Macola shares from a virtual server is fine even though it is not supported. I wouldn't suggest Macola to support it anytime in our lifetimes as they would then assume the responsibility of assisting customers with the plethora of virtualization configurations, which I can never see as being cost effective. Plus, as a software developer I can tell you, you want to be able to give your customers system requirements and your customers see that as a contract. When you get virtual and things are slow, what exactly is the system requirements contract? This gets very messy and just creates more unhappy customers in my opinion than just saying, "no, this is not supported or suggested, try at your own risk".

Scott Travis
Enterprise Expressions LLC

 

[NEmacGuy]

I question putting any new server into production today with out first considering virtualization as an option. I think it is the biggest thing to come since windows.

 

[NeWTRoG]

The following from vmware.com

Microsoft officially supports VMware ESX for running Microsoft Windows and major applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.

VMware ESX was the first hypervisor to be validated under the Microsoft Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), providing customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware. Customers can now run Exchange on vSphere with the peace of mind that they will receive the same level of support they received on physical servers.

New Microsoft licensing enables efficient use of VMotion. Microsoft licensing has recently been modified to allow customers to reassign licenses between physical servers as frequently as desired. This new licensing flexibility enables efficient use of VMotion for Windows Server and major applications including Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.

 

[stravis]

Let me be clear, I never said it was not supported. I only said it is not suggested for production use. If I were going to install SQL Server on a virtual server the only environment I would consider is VMWare ESX or ESXi. Microsoft's own Hypervisor has double the IO which is why I said that it IO is slower especially on Microsoft's products.

I am a big believer in Virtualization and use it often. I have even used it in production environments with SQL Server under the correct circumstances. I am only trying to provide a balanced view to the reader of this forum to ensure they understand that this is not necessarily the greatest thing since sliced bread for all environments.

IO is always the first thing that the layman SQL Professional usually ignores when it comes to SQL Server and it is by far the most important thing to consider when building a new server. Usually this is reflected in slow disks, RAID controllers, and RAID configurations. Most recently this has been with Virtualization. When I attended my last POW-WOW with Microsoft's SQL best this last year, this was addressed. There position was to never do this in a production environment, however I believe it can be find when speed is not as crucial. Most of these people are concerned with pushing milliseconds off each query and not the small business requirements that we all deal with.

And that is all I have to say about that.

 

[JDMiller]

We are running Macola Progression on Pervasive SQL windows vitual server. We have not had any issues for a couple years now. Today however we happened to get an error when trying to open Macola that we have never seen before.

function: 00920 pf-display bitmap

status: 00006 No more memory

A reboot seems to have resolved the problem but we would like to find the source of the problem.

Has anyone seen this error and found the cause?

 

[NeWTRoG]

What do Exact say?
"Sorry we don't support Macola in a virtual environment"?

 

[JDMiller]

Actually I was mistaken. Our Macola is not in our VM environment.

We had the issue occur again this week.

One other note is that if the users wait a period of time and try again then they can get in Macola.

We don't believe it is workstation related because multiple users will get the error at the same time and then it will stop at random.