New NAV 2016 installation with the Server Tier created and running on a Microsoft Virtual Machine.

DvDowling

I would just like to confirm if anyone is currently running their Microsoft NAV 2016 on an 'In-House' Microsoft VM machine? And, does it perform well enough that they would recommend it as an installation method?

My intention is to setup a very robust/high performance Windows Server 2012R2. Then on that HOST server I will create a VM machine that will also be a Windows 2012R2 Virtual Machine complete with SQL and NAV2016.

This idea is not new and pretty common for other purposes, but I want to know if anybody is currently and 'successfully' running NAV2016 in this style of Virtual Environment. Or, is the traditional Server hosting the Application in a NON-VM environment the only workable solution. Excluding a cloud/service solution.

mojo

I run my NAS and the client connections in a Hyper-V 20012 R2 virtual setup for Nav 2015 CU15. I have it mixed a bit between Server Core and Server with GUI. Both the NAS and Client Services run in this environment just fine from my experience. We are running 2015 CU15, and not 2016, but it is pretty much the same setup. Our SQL Server is a separate box from our service tier level, but our performance requirements for the SQL server and the service tier are pretty high as well.

The config we use for the service tier is 2 physical hosts, each with 16 cores and 256gb ram.
One guest runs just the NAS services for job queues and such, this has 8GB dynamic memory to a max of 96GB with 8 cores.
We have a second guest with the same NAS setup as the first host, but they are in a disabled state and it acts as a redundant server incase there is some trouble with the first guest, and it also runs the Nav Client connection service which clients use on a daily basis. This machine has 2GB dynamic memory and maxes at 32GB with 8 cores.
We have two other guests that are identical, both just handle clients, both are server core running 8 cores each and 2GB dynamic memory with a max of 32GB.

The hosts split the virtuals 50/50, but they can run all of them on a single host if the other host fails. We use DNS to round robin the connections between the 3 client machines. We average 22% CPU usage on both hosts, and the dynamic memory sits around 3GB-4GB after a few days of cached resources for each virtual. The NAS server tends to spike up to 30-60GB depending on the day and the task running at the time, while the nav client services can spike up to 20GB depending on some of the reports and tasks that the users run. We use Server Core due to the lower resources required to run the system, this allows for a pretty reasonable amount of head room that is not available on the GUI systems.

Fair warning, if you use Core, don't install the Nav MMC console stuff, it will upgrade the machine to a server with GUI setup and it takes forever because it has to download everything to do it. I handle of the configurations through the config files and not through the GUI anyways, so it does not change much for me, and I manage restarting the services for everything with powershell, as well as client config changes with powershell to make sure everyone has the exact same config.

Sorry for the long post... Hope it helps, if you have any questions about what we do, or you would like to see it, let me know and we can talk about it in more depth.