Epicor 905.602A and VMWare sizing question

[itsupport1]

I am trying the VMware community here to get some outside input. I am currently on a VMWare platform ESXI4.0 with 3 physical hosts running dual hexcore 2.66MHZ with 48 GB ram in each of the hosts. All this is connected to 2 separate ISCI optimized switches that the hosts and the SAN communication thru.

My question is how would you distribute the different OS for the Epicor application? My current setup is as follow:

1 physical hosts holds the Epicorapp (32GB RAM and 4VCPU) and ESET (2GB and 4VCPU)

1 physical hosts holds the EpicorSQL(16GB RAM 4VCPU) and Bartender-Advanced Print management ( 16GB 4VCPU)

1 physical hosts holds the Solidworks server (4GB RAM 4VCPU) and Citrix machine (4 GB and 4VCPU)

The current setup is kind of flawed at the moment due to miscommunications between different departments and needs to be fixed.

The epicor app needs 4 app server 1 sql 1 loader and 1 controller and that does not include any of the other servers that needs to run on this system.

The system was overspecced some when bought but within 5 months from purchase to go live the specs changed and the initial configuration was obsolete but now needs to be fixed.

I have searched high and low for answers to this but all i have at this time is some *gut* feeling about what i should do but noone to bounce the ideas off.

not asking for a tailored solution here just some input if any from people who currently are running epicor in a VM enviroment and are happy with there setup.

/Joakim

[AndreTheGiant]

Welcome to the community.

I've no experience with Epicor, but I've see huge VM running well in a virtual environment (SAP, Oracle, Exchange, ...).

How distribuite your VMs depends on really resource allocation.

Front-end and Back-end can be on the same host (for use intra-vSwitch communication).

But if you have DRS you can use this feature to balance your load.

Andre

[bstollfus]

Are you still looking for input?  We are going through a virtualized Epicor install for 150 users.

[itsupport1]

I would be very intrested in how this goes for you. What hardware you are running on and how you will distribute the different servers across the hosts and so forth.

I got some other hardware recommendations from Epicor and got a Fusion IO card to improve my  IOPS. The card works fine but no improvement worth mentioning in Epicor.

Looking forward to hear back on this install for you.

[bstollfus]

We went with FusionIO cards also.  We were getting 950MB/sec with 0 latency with SQLIO from the Fusion card on the ESXi host.  Epicor was still slow with the entire SQL 2012 VM on the Fusion card.  We had our APP server on our HP P4500 SAN and they suspected that was why.  After moving the APP server off the SAN onto the Fusion card with SQL, there was no change in performance.  Epicor is set to do "performance tuning" this week.

Our ESXi hosts are HP DL380p Gen8 E5-2670 with 256GB RAM, we have 3, but they are not dedicated to Epicor, but still have extremely low utilization.  We have worked with HP Storage, and VMware, and we have no issues on the hardware side, but do have 1 test left to run on the SAN to look at the latencies with IOmeter.

[itsupport1]

You are experiencing the same issues as me then. I dont see any issues with my hardware and i think its just a poor programming in Epicor that is the bottle neck problem. I even went to the extreme and installed everything on the Fusion IO card on a dedicated machine and still performance was poor.

Let me know what the Epicor "performance tuning" comes up with, also who from Epicor wil do this performance tuning ? Ben Nixon ? If not could you let me know so i have some names to throw to my Epicor account manager since he has no clue to what is going on :smileysilly:

Thanks

/Joakim

[bstollfus]

Sent you a private message with some Epicor contacts.  Will let you know how performance tuning goes next week.

Have you went live on Epicor yet, i saw you posted this way back in 2011