Virtual servers in production

[jsteinbach]

Hello All, I am wondering how many people are using virtual servers in
your production Windchill environment?



In the near future, I will be looking virtualize our production servers.
I would like to know what kind of issues you experienced when you moved
from physical to virtual servers.



Thanks,

John















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[srector]

John,

We had recently planned to move to a virtual environment. However, during testing we noticed a significant drop in performance when comparing the Virtual system to our current production system (with dedicated hardware).

Working with just the metadata showed comparable performance. But when we ran tests with our CAD data, the response times were 7 to 8 times slower. Specifically, we performed an "Add to Workspace' task with two of our larger assemblies. With dedicated servers the task took a little over a minute. However, when performing the same task on our virtual system it took between 7 and 8 minutes.

We have tried tweaking the configuration settings of the virtual system, but have yet to see any real performance improvement.

Recently we ran across some PTC literature discussing this topic. While I haven't completely finished digesting the material, the main points they make are that you really need to design your virtual environment from the ground up for PDMLink. In fact, if you take all of their recommendations into account, it almost sounds as if you end up with - A dedicated system.

While we haven't given up on the idea of 'Going Virtual', we are a lot less hopeful that it makes since for a production system. However, I still believe it has promise as a development system, since you can effectively create 'restore points' for your virtual image.

Steve