Server and Configurations

Question

Is anyone running System 9 on VMware? If so, how does it perform and what are the configurations you are using?
Any information would be a great help!
Thanks

Answer 1

I've got a couple of clients running System 9 on VMware (ESX) but with relatively small user bases (100ish). BI+ Performance is slightly slower than physical hardware when running large Financial reports but I haven't had many user complaints and for those that do, we schedule their report or book to run at night.
By far the biggest complaint though is from IT and they hate the fact that BI+ requires at least 4 gigs of ram. If you're going to be running Interactive or Production reporting, I would give up on the idea of VMware unless IT is willing to give you lots of memory.
In terms of Essbase, we've got some medium sized cubes being built with AIS on another VM and performance is roughly 20 - 30% slower on the VM than it is on physical hardware. This could be because of the amount of IO that we're doing (VMWare and ESX is usually pretty bad for this), but really it just means that an hour long cube build on physical hardware takes an hour and twenty minutes on VMware. Since the cubes are being refreshed during the night, an extra 20 minutes isn't such a bad comprimise.
In our environment, my testing had also revealed that large retrievals from Essbase take a bit longer too.