Cognos 8.4 on VM

[hybrid]

Is there anyone willingly to share their experiences/opinions on how Cognos runs on VM?

[RickC]

We are using 8.3 on VM and it runs fantastic. 

Some advantages:
- It gives us versatility to add resources during our busier time periods
- Allowed us to set-up a Development environment that truly mimics Production
- Reduced Hardware costs

You still have some disadvantages but they are the same ones always prevalent in Planning (like how it sucks up all the memory).

If you need details, I am not the IT person (I am the Finance Administrator).  But, we had it installed thru LodeStar Solutions ... and, like BrightStar, they are someone I recommend for anything Cognos related.

[nedcpa]

Just curious to know if Cognos will support your models/applications, running on your virtualized (VM) environment, if something goes wrong.

Ned

[thosas]

Planning works well through VM if... you have fairly small model sizes.  If you are running large or complex models then the peformance will be significantly worse through VMware.

Likewise if you are running a busy VM Host server then you will find that performance is adversly affected.

I have run comparison timings for a test model on multiple VM sites against dedicated hardware sites and find that the VM hardware runs at around 4spn (seconds per node) on a prepare import job for example, against a 1.2spn on the equivalent physical machine.

IF you have small models and low numbers of e.list items VMware should work well for you.

[RickC]

Ned, yes, the virtual environment is now fully supported.

[ovo]

I have heard that running planning on the latest 'Nehalem' based chipsets with vSphere 4 could be a good combination for best performance.

Interested to know if anyone has any experience of this?

[MFGF]

Hi M,

No actual experience of this, but I've heard that Power7 generally gives better performance for virtualization than Nehalem (although you can probably guess where this came from if you have looked at any of the LFG strategic objectives for this year).  Hmm - I'd probably better stop flying that blue flag! ;)

Cheers!

MF.

[SomeClown]

Nehalem and Vsphere4:

One client did but there were still problems in the environment.  Hard to say root cause but when it worked, it did seem to provide better speed than older comparable VM deployments.