As an employee of an ERP partner implementing the Microsoft Dynamics Line of Business Applications (mainly AX), I have a open question:
How can we best and efficently measure the expected performance of a customers virtual platform?
I know this is a oversimplification, but it would be very nice to have some kind of benchmarking tool to be able to get some top level numbers. Is there any tools available for bundling CPU, memory latency (?), IOPS and networking performance without installing the software?
We have the knowledge and experience to describe the performance characterietics of a standard solution and also some benchmarks from Microsoft (Hyper-V), but it is always a dilemma to get the needed time in an implementation to perform a complete benchmark (complete installation and benchmarking the solution on the platform).
It would be sufficent to get a high level view of the expected performance at a given time and re run rhis periodically to see the trend. In a completely open virtual platform (all vms have the same priority to all system resources) this could be enough information for us. The worst cases is when the customer has outsourced the IT platform to an external service provider with Shared Services approach (a bunch of vms from different customers utilizing the same hosts and Storage system).
Bottom line it's all about trying to meet the customers expectations and rely on some measures in the argumentation...
Hopefully someone has some input and experience to share.
If this should be posted in another thread, just let me know and I'll move it ASAP.
Thank you in advance.
