Hi Brad, Apologies if this thread is getting a bit stale, but I did want to chime in with our experiences, as we may have been one of the original posts on this topic a few years back ...
We run approximately two dozen VMs on a three-host VMWare cluster. This includes both "production" and "staging" machines. Of these, four are production 4D databases. Similarly to what you're proposing, we also run an Apache VM on an Ubuntu 14.04 install that serves as a front-end reverse-proxy for the applications. As far as the physical setup, the servers themselves were pretty top-of-the-line when we originally provisioned them. Dual-processor with a healthy dose or RAM. We back these up with two SAN storage devices, one of which uses SAS drives (for the production VMs) and another older device using SATA drives (for staging, non-critical machines). Overall, we've been largely happy with this setup over the years. A few takeaways: - Add as much RAM as you can and spend money on your disks. We've had issues with some of our SANs and they can be a major source of headaches. The new VSAN tech in VMWare 6.0 is looking like it might be a promising alternative to networked storage, though. - Have the initial setup be done by someone who deals with VMWare on a daily basis. I can't even begin to describe the amount of black magic and voodoo behind some of the setup options that I've seen folks fiddling with, but it makes an enormous difference performance-wise. - Depending on the setup, you may see a performance drop in moving from fast local hardware on bare iron, to a virtualized environment. But ... - The ability to spin up new VMs, take snapshots, have high-availability failover is really nice. Feel free to PM me if you'd like any more details on our experience with this setup. Thanks, - Clayton Clayton Donahue iVantage Health Analytics(r) 300 Chestnut St., Suite 101 | Needham, MA 02492 direct: 781.247.2071 | office: 781.449.5287 email: [email protected] | iVantageHealth.com ________________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Perkins, Bradley D <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 10:16 AM To: Active4D Developer Discussion List Subject: Re: [Active4d-dev] Active4D running in a VM? (revisited) Peter, Thanks for sharing your experience. If you don't mind can I ask you some questions off list? Best, Brad On 4/21/15 1:03 AM, "Peter Gutbrod" <[email protected]> wrote: >Hi Brad, > >I'm doing this for about 2-3 years. Runs perfectly smooth and rock solid. > >You can run your Windows/4D vm and your Linux/Apache vm on the same >host. For best performance make sure the Windows/4D vm has plenty of RAM >allocated and you use a separate physical drives for the Windows/4D vm, >ideally a SSD. > >Peter >_______________________________________________ >Active4D-dev mailing list >[email protected] >http://list.aparajitaworld.com/listinfo/active4d-dev >Archives: http://active4d-nabble.aparajitaworld.com/ > _______________________________________________ Active4D-dev mailing list [email protected] http://list.aparajitaworld.com/listinfo/active4d-dev Archives: http://active4d-nabble.aparajitaworld.com/ _______________________________________________ Active4D-dev mailing list [email protected] http://list.aparajitaworld.com/listinfo/active4d-dev Archives: http://active4d-nabble.aparajitaworld.com/
