Three years ago a large national medical association here in the Twin Cities (Minnesota, USA) shared with us that they had been running Dynamics SL in a virtual environment for the past year. We were surprised. That environment was not supported by Microsoft, yet here they were running in this environment for a year, without incident, and casually mentioned that this was working fine on their SAN.
Since then, we’ve had many Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL clients running our products on virtualized environments. Mostly people have chosen VMWare, but occasionally we run into Hyper-V as well. Most picked VMWare because they were the leaders in the market, the “standard” option for virtualization. Microsoft just came on the market with Hyper-V in 2008.
Hardware is expensive and buying a slightly more expensive machine to do the job of 4-5 servers makes sense. Here are some of the issues and things to be aware of when virtualizing these two mainstream Microsoft ERP products-Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP:
1.) Microsoft still does not support VMWare but your VAR probably does.
2.) Splitting out SQL Server onto another (virtual) machine still makes sense in larger installations.
3.) Moving your whole environment including data to another physical machine is much easier, creating redundancy is easier, so replicating one’s environment becomes less complex.
If you are a Dynamics consultant having issues virtualizing these products, we can help you. Email me at jboyer@boyerassoc.com if you need help. We charge for these services but are eager to help you set up an environment that can help you save your client money in hardware costs.
