Physical Servers to Virtual

We are looking to move our Lawson Infor from physical servers to Virtual as part of our 9.0.1 to V10 upgrade. I am seeking feedback with any concerns, configuration tip, etc.

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Comments

serafino

We have had our 901 test/dev server virtualized for a few years with no issues other than some initial tweaks. Production has a VM for DR failover, so if production fails on the metal the virtualized "copy" will go live. Looks to me like LSF doesn't care if it runs on the metal, but I would advise to run LSF and the database on separate machines. You get much better throughput, and I think that has to do with threading on the level of the VM's OS. Since I pulled data out of the VM for test/dev, everything is smooth.

richardd

We have been running virtualized for several years (VMware). No issues with the Lawson software. The major difference is that performance tuning options are more limited when storage is on the SAN vs local disks. The Virtual servers can be guaranteed CPU and memory resources but the bottleneck tends to be contention with other systems on the shared SAN. Once we got our SAN configured to keep the Lawson workload from contenting with other high volume systems, our performance has been great.

sean-howlin

I first started running Lawson on Virtual servers a few years ago. I was a skeptic at first, but now I'm a firm believer in the technology.

In the virtual environment, our server engineering teams have the ability to dynamically allocate resources (CPU, memory, etc) to servers when needed. This has come in handy many times in the past as organizations and system needs change.

Also, backups (snapshots) and restores are a breeze. I remember those days when we had depend on backup tapes for system restores, and it a was a time consuming and arduous process. With virtualization, you can bring down your Lawson system, take snapshot and restore a system within 10 minutes if needed. Nice!

Good luck to you,
Marilyn Sizemore

unknown

Hi Marilyn,

How big is your concurrent user base? 100-250 concurrent users?

Tom.

sean-howlin

Hi there, Tom. I couldn't speak to concurrent users at any given time - it really depends on the business process cycle. We have over 11,000 employees setup with access to Lawson (Many are ESS/MSS users). I'd say we have around 2300-ish back off support users using core S3 apps. Right now we are using HyperV. We used VMware at my last company. As a Sr ERP Admin I found both work fine with the Lawson environment.

unknown

thank you very much Marilyn. This is helpful.

We are migrating to Lawson 10 also. Our user base is similar in size to yours. However, we are moving from AIX platform to all Windows (LSF, Landmark, IPA, Mingle servers). I assume that you are on Windows also?

I'm just trying to gauge how stable Windows platform is for the new Landmark and LSF environment.

sean-howlin

Doppelganger Tom - we really need to chat! I'm right in the middle of moving from 9x AIX to 10x Windows. (LSF, LMK, IPA, Ming.le). GEN / LDAP migration is a beast.

I just kicked off UAT so I can't really share any experience with a real load on the new windows servers just yet.

At my last shop, we ran S3 9x on Windows with VMware. VMware worked fine. Windows worked fine as well. Windows server was powerful and stable.
The only issues I had were WAS memory contention crashes, mostly due to heavy processflow usage. If you can, I'd highly recommend standing up a clustered WAS environment on your LSF server with at least 3 app servers to help with the load. LMK is not yet supported in a clustered env. I made this a requirement for our LSF 10x installer. It was a bit more work for the installer, but I'm really glad we have 3 clustered WAS app servers.

unknown

Hello Marilyn,

We are also running Lawson in a virtual environment and have recently started having troubles with the snapshots, whenever a snapshot is taken both of these servers lose connectivity to the SQL backend. We have LSF 10.0.3 and Landmark for Infor Process Automation 10.0.4.x running Windows 2008 R2 with VM 5.5.

Opened a ticket with Lawson and they indicated that they didn't support Lawson on VM and the only recommendation was to turn off VMotion and Snapshots and to contact VMware, or to get off of VM which isn't really an option.

Do you always bring down the Lawson application before taking snapshots? How often do you do this? Any tips you may have for managing Lawson in a VM environment would be appreciated.

John

unknown

John,

we ran into a similar issue with the snapshots running and causing the connectivity to drop with landmark and also our other servers like LSF, MSCM, and LBI. We found that when the snapshot kicked off, it would create enough of a connection blip (Less than a second). We worked with vendor and they were to be working on a fix, in the meantime we turned off the snapshot since we don't update the server but once a quarter for OS patching or other large event and add a manual step to run a snapshot before any major work. This has eliminated our issue. It sounds similar as we too are on Vm 5.5. Let me know questions

unknown

Thanks for the confirmation of the work around. Lawson also recommends turning off Vmotion, do you know if it is shut off in your environment or have you left it on with no issues?

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