Planning and VMWare

[terry_stjean]

We are looking at moving our Cognos Planning server to a VMWare server.
Cognos Planning is version 8.1 and VMWare is version 3.
I know Cognos does not officially support running Planning on VMWare but I know it's being done.
So, is there anyone reading this that is running this type of setup.
And if so, can you tell me what issues you have dealt with?

Terry

[SomeClown]

Performance is significantly slower for administrative tasks, and sometimes fails with random errors (nothing predictable or consistent).

[gidster]

We have been running the client components on VM Ware (ie Virtual Desktops) for some time.  No real issues (once all the permissions on the registry keys were granted on the VM Template).

We use this for Planning Analyst & Manager, Planning Admin Console, Access Manager, Framework Manager, Cognos Controller.

We also recently moved to VMware for our Servers (Contributor Application Server, Cognos 8 Application Server, Cognos Controller Application Server, Web Gateway Server) and all seems to be running OK.

Things to watch out for: Make sure you have enough Hard Drive space, RAM & CPUs allocated to the servers.  Particularly when running Job Server jobs (eg reconciles) we practically take out the real hardware (ESX Server) that the Virtual Servers are running on.  Our plan is to try and set up more Job Servers with only 2 processors each (instead of 1 Job Server and 4CPUs).

Other than that things seem to be working pretty well.

So far no odd errors.

[ovo]

Performance is the big problem.  If job performance is important to you, then you should definately not run your job servers on VMWare.  It is much slower, even on ESX if you allocate a phyical CPU to one virtual CPU.  Remeber the contributor calc engine scales up the processor grabbing 100% CPU, not out accross the processors.

[mikewalker]

Thanks guys - this is great info for anyone evaluating virtualisation with Cognos.

Cheers!