Anyone running VMWare?

NT environment.

Our server support staff would like to move us onto a "VMWare" machine. Does anyone have any experience with it?

(see: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/gsx_features.html)

Dan Bowker
Northern Trust
Web Publishing Technology

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Comments

james1

As with any other software running on a VMWare virtual machine, TeamSite is slower. I guess if the VMWare server is a bazillion times faster than your current TeamSite server, then your net speed change could be positive.

-- James

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James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering

Bowker

Are you saying that you have seen this work or that you expect it to work or you have no idea if it will work.

(how much slower?)

Dan Bowker
Northern Trust
Web Publishing Technology

james1

I have seen TS5.5.2 running in a VMWare virtual environment. I believe that that is supported, since a VMWare virtual environment is supposed to look and smell just like a normal computer. But you might verify that with Tech Support.

What I saw was a lot slower. But, my machine was probably under the specs for VMWare *and* TeamSite, much less TeamSite *in* VMWare. ;-) Just IE was noticeably slower. Again, your mileage may vary. I'm sure that with a beefy machine it is less noticeable.

-- James

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James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering

sajiddc

bowker,

I will talk here from my personal experience to shed some light.

In the past, I was successful in running Teamsite on vmWare. Started to have problems after i had 2 different versions of Teamsite on 2 different Vmware instance.

Please check and double check with Interwoven support to make sure that they will support teamsite when running on vmWare.

Hope that helps.

nipper

I would avoid the VMWare config.

It works, we used to demo TS in vmware all the time. But you do pay a significant penalty in performance to do it.

That being said, Interwoven's "demo island" is/was VMware driven, so they could dump one config & bring up a second very quickly. (Go from Weblogics to WebSphere). Being able to dump changes and be back at the original state was very nice. Of course that probably is not the behavior you want. :-)

Andy

Migrateduser

As Andy notes, we at Interwoven have used VMWare successfully in many occasions. I would seriously recommend you take a look at the ESX server as opposed to GSX. The ESX server can address the hardware and memory directly and thus has much better performance than the GSX server. The GSX server still has to sit ontop of either Linux of Windows.

The performance of TeamSite under VMWare ESX server should not be noticeably different than running TeamSite natively, assuming you are able to allocate enough memory and CPUs to the VMWare instance running TeamSite.

So to summarize, I agree with the previous posters that VMWare GSX server probably isn't a good idea for enterprise applications such as TeamSite. But I would feel very comfortable recommending ESX server assuming you are running it on an SMP Intel box with enough CPUs and memory to allocate to TeamSite.