What is your experience with virtualizing Empower?

LWood

<p>If your company is currently using VMWare software virtualization with Empower, we would be interested in knowing about your experience with this.   Please feel free to share this information with us via the community or directly to <a href="mailto:lauren_wood@waters.com">lauren_wood@waters.com</a>, Empower 3 Product Manager.  In particular, we are interested in knowing the following:</p><ul><li>What components you have virtualized (database server, Citrix server, File Server, Clients, etc.)
</li><li>If you have found that you require more CPU or RAM than in a physical environment (please quantify as best as you are able)
</li><li>If you are using virtual server clusters (VMWare High Availability cluster technology - if so, how many servers/cluster and how many clusters)
</li><li>If the virtual machines are using VMotion technology
</li><li>If the configuration includes VMWare Fault Tolerance
</li><li>Any other information that you think is important for us to know
</li></ul><p>Thank You-</p><p>Lauren</p>

Katarzyna

Hi Lauren,

my company is getting ready for empower upgrade. We are thinking about Empower 2.

The VMware set up is very attractive option to IT department, during the upgrade discussions with Waters representatives in UK and it was said that VMware set up is not supported by Waters. In this case they are reluctant to configure empower on VMware.

In this post are you saying this is changing altogether, or there is going to be VMware support for Empower 3 from Waters?

Cheers

Kate

KG

My company has virtualized Citrix servers to run the Empower client.  We still run the DB on a physical box since Oracle can get a bit twitchy if it doesn't have a really good connection to its disks.  The Citrix servers (we run two of them for each database GxP/Non-GxP) seem to perform just fine with dual CPU and 4GB of memory.  The limitations of a 32 bit client running on a 32 bit OS make it fairly meaningless to try and throw more memory at the system.  It's easier to put up another Citrix server, especially in a VMWare environment where you can have templates ready to deploy.  We run 5 physical ESX hosts for our entire VM environment with HA and VMotion set up to take the best advantage of available resources.  VMWare fault tolerance looks like a nice option, but it has a limitation of only being able to support a VM with 1 CPU.  If that changes, We will likely jump on it.  We also run our entire test environment on VMs, including the DB server (performance doesn't matter so much there).  So far, the VMWare environment has been very solid.  We have found that a bit of forethought in setting up the environment has saved us some time and hassle down the road.

LWood

Hi Kate-  Yes, Waters plans to support VMWare virtualization with Empower 3.  We will support virtualizing the database server, the file server and the Citrix farm.

Best Regards,
Lauren