Cognos 8.2 and VMWare

[terry_stjean]

I know Cognos 8 is supported in VMWare but is anyone currently running their production Cognos 8 environment under VMWare? What issues, if any have came up and how did you deal with them.

Terry

[COGNOiSe administrator]

VMWare should be used for development and testing only. IT is way too much of an overhad for a production system.

[mikewalker]

Hmmm, VMWare may have some overheads, but what about general virtualization of Cognos?

There are other platforms such as Xen, VirtualBox, Parallels etc that may offer good ROI for running Cognos (and/or other DW/BI apps) inside virtual machines.

[COGNOiSe administrator]

Every virtualization software will create additional delays and congestions on the IO. If multiple OS instances have to share same CPU, RAM and disk, there is no way they would be as fast as a standalone equivalents.

[mikewalker]

Yes, very true!

Although in many cases it may make sense for organisations to buy a single server (fast CPU, loads of RAM) and share its resources between a number of virtual machines, say for example:

1 x Cognos environment
1 x Database
1 x Web server
1 x OLAP server

All of which, individually, may not ever use 100% of the server resources at any one time, but may share it collectively quite well.

This would also make physical management easier (only 1 rack space used).

[COGNOiSe administrator]

True, it is just a trade-off between money, space and acceptable response or processing times. If you are bursting 10,000 report outputs at night, while everything resides on same physical machine, then it might be acceptable. But if your need is near-real-time reporting, then it's a different story.

[tazman]

We tried our Cognos PLanning /Cognos 8.2 reporting environment on VM in Production and the report processing was just too slow. Reports were taking 5 minutes to run, that would only take 15 seconds on a native install. The amount of Processors and memory was the same between the two. Couldn't figure out why so we went back to the native environment

[mikewalker]

Good feedback, thanks for that.

Did you install all the tiers onto a single VM machine? (ie Database, Application/Dispatchers, Web Servers)? Or were the components split out to different boxes?

Probably wouldn't have made any difference, just curious as to the setup.

Michael