VM Ware with Navision

rjk

Does anyone have experience running a production Navision system (Navision DB) on a virtual server with VM Ware? Any experiences (positive or negative) would be appreciated.

David_Singleton

Is this because you want to run an unsupported older version on 2003? If you have a support contract you would be better to do a technical upgrade.

As to your actual question, sorry no, but Because of the disk activity required, I really can not see this as being a great solution.

rjk

Not sure what the first part of your post refers to...but the reason we are interested in using VM Ware is the ease of restore in the event that the server has a physicial hardware issue. VM ware or server virtualization is becoming increasingly common and I would expect (hope) that a microsoft product would run on it.

David_Singleton

Do you mean restoring the Navision SERVER? That takes only a few minutes, so there is not too much time to save, the only thing would be the Database, and that will be the same issue no matter how you do it.

The only reason I could see for use VM would be to run an old version of Navision on a new server.

rjk

The reason would be if some hardware on the server went down and the server part couldn't be delivered until the following day, with VM ware it would be very easy to "move" the Navision virtual server to a new physical server minimizing any downtime to the system.

DenSter

Good idea for development, bad idea for production.

rjk

Can you elaborate on why it would be a bad idea for production (ie. the reasons it is bad)?

Does Microsoft have a plan for Navision running on virtual servers as this is certainly where the future of data centers is heading?

ara3n

I had to help a client who was trying to run test environment on sql on VM with Navision and could not finish restoring the back. He was running through some weird SQL errors I had never seen. I told him to install it on a regular box and be done with it.

DenSter

Because with virtual servers you're not running on actual hardware but on virtual hardware. The performance gain of having multiple pieces of hardware is negated by putting those pieces of hardware in virtual machines. You can set up a virtual array of discs, but without the actual discs that wouldn't make much sense.

I had a question from one of my customers that had everything set up in virtual servers (different logical drives, disc arrays, everything), but all of it was running on one machine, and they were wondering why it was so slow...

Virtualization is great for development though, you can have multiple different environments up in no time, with hardly any hardware costs. Just don't expect it to perform as well as the real deal.

DenSter

ara3n wrote:

I had to help a client who was trying to run test environment on sql on VM with Navision and could not finish restoring the back. He was running through some weird SQL errors I had never seen. I told him to install it on a regular box and be done with it.

Right... another issue is that NAV is not certified on VMWare, and as long as MSFT has their own virtualization software that's not likely to happen... they can't even get it to work right on Vista.

What do you think will happen first... NAV on Vista or on VMWare? Maybe on Virtual PC and/or Virtual Server it'll work, but again, not in production, it will simply not perform as well as 'real' hardware.