SIMS server as a VM

[techie08]

Hi

Is anyone else running SIMS as a VM in VSphere? Our school has approx 1200 students and 120 staff and it would be good to know if anyone is doing this.
The warranty for the physical server for SIMS is now run out and im toying with the idea of coverting to a VM

Our Vsphere environment is:
3 x HP DL380 with 2 x 2.66ghz quadcore and 34gb RAM in each
1 x Dothill SAN (Fiber) with 2.4tb of SAS storage.

Thanks

[Chuckster]

Running SIMS & FMS in a VM on ESXi 4.1. No real issues experienced and it is hosted on a server with a dedicated HDD array of its own (Raid 1+0).

[techie08]

Is your SIMS server heavily utilised? What resources did you assign to it? eh CPU, RAM?

Thanks

[Abaddon]

VM here - no issues (4 vCPU's, 4Gb RAM), with a NetApp SAN. (1250ish students, around 200 staff)

[techie08]

Cool, Thanks Guys

[Chuckster]

Is your SIMS server heavily utilised? What resources did you assign to it? eh CPU, RAM?

Thanks

It is, and only during peak periods, e.g. online registration, assessment manager etc. It's no different from it being actually run on a physical server. I only VM'd it so that it makes life easier for me to backup and restore (should there be a problem).


The server it is hosted is a HP ML370 G5

2x Intel Xeon 2.83 Quad-Core
32GB RAM
10 x 146GB 15K SAS HDDs
2 x 1Gbit quad port NIC

[User3204]

We run ours within the VM ESX vsphere cluster, it's been given 4 processors, and 8gb ram.
We have about the same number of staff, and 1500 students.

It runs okay, I've never seen SIMS run fast though.

I'm not sure what the underlying server specs are for the hosts, OTOH, they're three years old though.
The disks it uses are a SAS based SAN, with 12 disks in RAID6+1 arrangement, no special access to this for SIMS.

I think I did give the SIMS server more "shares" but this was before the upgrade from ESX 3, done by an external engineer, so I don't know if this was transferred across.

[glennda]

I've got mine on linux kvm host with 6 procs and 10gb ram sans fiber channel 15k sas drives.

As said above i've never seen sims run amazingly quick. Its not awful though!