Deployment Solution

I'm currently running DS 6.9 (and CMS) on an older hardware server. It's stable and works fine, but it's time to start looking at either new hardware or virtualizing. Last time I checked, running DS on a VM was being done, but not always with the best results.

What's the current situation with running DS from a VMware VM? Is it stable and/or preferred? What will the upcoming SP2 add/fix?

-Mike

We are running all DS6.9's on VM's with no change in behavior from physical servers. But the latest update is SP5 for DS 6.x family and will prob be the last major update. We are running SP2 because it seems to be the most stable of the bunch.

Are you using a dedicated NIC interface for DS?

We run our DS in a VM as well. DS 6.9 SP5 MR1, actually. We run it on a VMWare ESXi host, and have defined 2x 1Gb NICs and a virtual switch. We have then teamed the NICs to give us more throughput. The server it's running on has a 10Gb NIC (multiple actually), so it works pretty well.

To be perfectly honest, this system has been more stable after a "Physical-to-Virtual" migration onto ESXi than it ever was on a dedicated HP DL385 server. I recommend it, and it looks to be supported by Symantec as well now.

Best thing is, we can back up the databases in SQL, then snapshot the DS, then try the latest hotfix or SP. Wort case, we restore the databases and roll back the snapshot... and it's like it never happened. You can also clone the VM into a test environment... which is pretty cool.

I'm assuming that when you are talking about SP2 you mean DS7.1 SP2 ?

However, DS7.1 Works just fine on VM's - I use it daily bases here.  But you would need to give decent amount of memory to it.

for upcoming DS 7.1 SP2 (or even existing DS 7.1) if needs to be used in production environment with significant processing load then addition to good memory on VM; if you have VM on a fast IO storage (MSD) then you can see much better and stable performance.

Thanks for all your replies. It sounds like my options are to do a p2v of my existing DS 6.9 system or do a new install of 7.1 (after sp2) and migrate everything. It also sounds like dedicated NICs are important, so I'll have to work that out as well. I'm leaning towards a p2v of my 6.9 system right now. I'll report back after I get it done.

Mike