Has anyone re-hosted to VMWARE for production?

Hello

In 2014 when I upgrade Windchill from 9.1 to 10.1 I took the opportunity to upgrade servers and agreed with IT to move to VMWare (easy to add resources, cpu and memory). As business admin and users the only difference noticed was that Windchill perform much better (surely because the old kit was 6 year old). In other words, as Project Manager at that time, I can say that the move to VMWare have been painless and very transparent. (Of course we had a test environment also on VMWare etc....)

Now, please do not ask me what was the mark of our VMWare,  I have charged IT to specs and install within budget so I am unable to tell you anything apart of that it was running on Windows Server and not linux

Hope this helps

Best regards

We use VMWare extensively in our development and test areas.  Our production server is still physical hardware with Linux RedHat OS on it. Our Preproduction Test environment is also physical hardware so that it can mimic production better, but all of our other machines are VMs. For development the VMs are Windows based. Our Integration and Demo environments are VMs with Linux. For development, using the VMs has greatly improved our productivity. We have VMs that are used for automated nightly builds of new code. With Windchill installed on its own drive in the VMs, the build process just copies the newly built drive to a file share where our developers can copy it and just swap it into their development VMs and poof! you have a brand new Windchill installation with all code compiled and all load files loaded.  With the test and demonstration environments, once we had one installed and configured on one, our sys admin just cloned it to make the next environment. We then "rehosted" and we were up and running with a new installation. Using VMware to "reset" back to a snapshot works as well. The nightly build does that following the build and copy. Once the new drive has been copied to the share, the build command reverts the VM back to a snapshot that is a plain ootb installation of Windchill.  As for the stability of VMware, we've been pretty successful using it. I occasionally have trouble with the Anti-Virus scan on my laptop causing my development VM to hang.

A lot of our production installs run on VMs running both Linux and Windows. We have used Cisco Unified Computing System server platform as the hardware and VMWare for virtualization. We have tested production infrastructure with load generators and it stood strong and stable for 4k concurrent users. We did not find the breaking point though. Personally I have observed older versions of RHEL were not so VM friendly, but RHEL 6.x works really good. If you have an optimized underlying host architecture, I/O, storage subsystems, performance and stability, VMWare offers best performance.

Apart from this, JVM performance is what really dictates windchill's performance. Solaris is my pick in that regard, i have observed the best performance for JVM in Solaris. Then Linux and Windows.If you can afford to spend on SSD, memory swapping will not take a toll on overall OS and JVM performance(We have it for DB not for App).

As Stacy mentioned above, backup and restore, DR capabilities of VMWare Infrastructure stays unparalleled . It comes very handy when you have a challenging code build and deploy cycle with multiple environments. We have used snapshots a lot in testing some configuration updates and offers a faster way for recovery in the event of failures. We have used Zerto for VM mirroring for DR.  VMotion offers high availability protecting you against any underlying hardware system failures.

Thanks

Binesh

Barry Wehmiller International