Anyone running SIMS under Xen in production?

[pete]

I have a POC test install and live migrations work (and I have a case with Capita re status of supported/unsupported config), and wondered if anyone else had their SIMS server running under Xen.

[dhicks]

wondered if anyone else had their SIMS server running under Xen.

Not yet, planning to move the SIMS server over to a fresh Windows Server 2008 install running under Xen during Easter.

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David Hicks

[ChrisH]

I think Ric has this kind of setup.

[dhicks]

wondered if anyone else had their SIMS server running under Xen.

It's working now, or at least is has been for at least a whole week now. Windows Server 2008 running under Xen on Centos 5.1. I've also just set up a Terminal Server for clients, so we don't have to have SIMS installed as a client on machines any more and we can use TrustedAuto logins so that people can log in to "SIMS" with their standard network username and password.

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David Hicks

[Ric_]

Don't know how I missed this thread... I've been running SIMS on XenServer for months - migration was last summer.

[pete]

Heh, also forgot about this. For anyone searching the line I got from Capita was (paraphrased) "we support SIMS running on $windows_server_versions and while we have no objections to you running SIMS in a virtual environment, we (helldesk) won't be able to handle any problems with the virtualisation side".

@Ric / dhicks

Did you do before/after performance comparisons? How much (if any) difference was there, taking into account any bonuses conveyed by new hardware?

[Ric_]

@pete: No. I was running SIMS on rubbish hardware and now I'm not... it works well. The pretty graphs that XenServer gives also allows you to better spec your server so that you aren't 'wasting' resources.

[dhicks]

For anyone searching the line I got from Capita was (paraphrased) "we support SIMS running on $windows_server_versions and while we have no objections to you running SIMS in a virtual environment, we (helldesk) won't be able to handle any problems with the virtualisation side".

I had no problems in getting SIMS support to help with installation problems in getting SIMS installed on our virtual server. The issue was completly unrelated to anything to do with virtualisation, I simply hadn't installed all the required Windows Server 2008 Internet Services components for SQL Server 2005 to work properly, but the help desk were, well, helpful.

Did you do before/after performance comparisons? How much (if any) difference was there, taking into account any bonuses conveyed by new hardware?

I didn't do any before/after comparision - we only have a few administration users, performance isn't that
important. I moved to a virtual server because I wasnted to be able to mirror VMs to provide failover and to free up the original server to act as a terminal server.

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David Hicks