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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived) / AX2009 & VMware pe...
Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived)

AX2009 & VMware performance issues

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Posted on by Community Member

At our company we run VMware en have virtualized the AOS and SQL server of AX2009. And experience serious performance issues. If we install the same situation on an inferior, but physical, piece of hardware. The performance jumps up by more than 100%.


Benchmarking the SQL server indicates VMware machine outperforms de physical SQL server with ease. It seems like a communication problem(s) between virtual AOS and virtual DB server.


Vsphere 4.1.0. We setup VMware so the hardware resources may not be shared with other machines (not that any other are running on our ESX machine). Does anyone have an idea what could be the culprit?

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  • David Keding Profile Picture
    David Keding on at

    I think you need to narrow this down a bit further. Test virtual AOS with the physical SQL server and then you have a direct comparison between how your virtual AOS works compared to the physical AOS. If no major differences here then you have a SQL issue and it could be lots of issues in how the SQL is setup.... maintenace jobs etc.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    This is the by default issue with Vmware  and Ax.

    So you can try The Microsoft Virtual PC it will work fine as compare to Vmware.

    One thing should be noted that Virtual machine system is always slow as compare to physical system.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    Good morning,

    We have done testing with virtual AOS and virtual SQL machines in the mix. And our benchmarks (a SQL query heavy project recalculation batch) show the follow:

    ------- AOS ---SQL---benchmark

    AX50 Virtual Virtual - 215 seconds

    AX50 Fysical Virtual - 165 seconds

    AX50 Virtual Fysical - 151 seconds

    AX50 Fysical Fysical - 110 seconds

    We are going to try Hyper-V, because that is what Microsoft recommends. I'll keep you posted.

  • David Keding Profile Picture
    David Keding on at

    Hi Jeroen,

    Thanks for the numbers, highly interesting!  We seem to get fairly decent performance on most lighter AX operations using vmware - WIn2008R2, but as soon as you run heavier operations then virtual AOS servers are significantly slower in our case. I believe you need to make sure that you have enough disk performance as this is very, very crucial for AX.  

  • Back2Ax Profile Picture
    Back2Ax on at

    This is in my opinion one of the more interesting threads in a long time.

    Jeroen:

    Your findings and measurements under Hyper-V will be very interesting especially if the underlying hardware and infrastructure will be the same as for your previous test under VMWare (comparable). I haven't had the oportunity to do such tests, but I also have noticed unpredictable performance when running heavy load on an AOS instance hosted on VMWare. Since virtualization brings a lot of added compexity on the infrastructure level, the discussion should also reflect this and details regarding the underlying infrastructure should be decribed. And the physical host is at risk of having bottlenecks on the network level. In addition the priority for the AOS is also important and the same is seeing the total load on the host.

    David:

    Based on my experience, an AOS instance is mostly CPU, memory and network intensive, and normally less disk intensive. What could influence a virtualized AOS instance dramatically (bad) is memory pressure where the virtual machine starts paging "inside" the virtual disk file. In general the underlying disk system where the virtual disk files are stored, is important for performance in virtualized environments.

    My general advise is to avoid virtualization of AOS if it fits into the strategy of the customer (allows physical servers) and predictable performance is important.

    One theory of mine is that the AOS service utilizes memory mapped files which in turn impacts paging (pages/sec performance counter) and paging is bad when running under any hypervisor. I really think Microsoft should advise more in this matter and lifte the discussion above the product level (Hyper-V versus VMWare and others).

    Awaiting further updates to this thread.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    Personally I didnt expect much from testing with Hyper-V. But my system administrator was so kind to provide me with means to test this virtualisation technology anyway. The results left me flabbergasted(i like that word) checking the benchmark a couple of times. Hyper-V outperformed VMware... by alot.

    Together with someone from cost control and a few of my IT collegues we identified 8 'slow' processes(heavy reports and batch processing). And benchmarked them into 1 average performance index.

    AX40 (Fysical): 100%

    AX50 (Fysical): 109% (9% slower in average)

    AX50 (Hyper-V): 131% (31% slower)

    AX50 (VMware): 176% (76% slower)

    One would expect that you could lose 10 up to 20% performance when virtualising a server. And Hyper-V gives us this expected performance loss (when compared to AX50 fysical). My system administrator thinks it might have to do with VMware being a OS independable technology, and Hyper-V being specifically designed for W2008 R2. Which all of our virtual servers are equipped with. I must admit I don't have much knowledge on this matter though.

    What I do know, is that we're switching soonish to an all Hyper-V rollout.

  • Back2Ax Profile Picture
    Back2Ax on at

    Interesting...

    I think the theory of your system administrator can be a good one and (but?) my next general question based on this is What about all the customers running AOS on WMWare if this is true for all environments? MS states that VMWare is supported (Virtual server support) and I guess most customers are running VMWare (historical reasons).

    I think the most important missing fact right now is the differences in the underlying infrastructure between your VMWare and Hyper-V implementations.

    The 9% decreased performance for a physical implementation of AX 2009 is reasonable (AX 2009 has a heavier footprint compared to AX 4.0).

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    I think the most important missing fact right now is the differences in the underlying infrastructure between your VMWare and Hyper-V implementations.

    VMware was shut down, Hyper-V got assigned the same resources on the same machine. The ISCSI discs where switched. Afaik. There is no differerence in underlying infrastructure. Not a fysical difference anyway.

    The other question you pose is an interesting one. Is this an isolated case? As you can guess, I do not know. I can only report my findings, and maybe another user can fill us in on this one :-)

  • David Keding Profile Picture
    David Keding on at

    Thanks Jeroen! Very nice!  I haven't had a chance to test Hyper-V and I think this is a real eye opener.

    @AX2009Tech - Perhaps I need to clarify, you are correct in that the AOS instance when running on a physical server is dependent on CPU, memory, network - and disk, well that isn't very important. However that is running on physical hardware. If you are running virtual images do not underestimate the need for fast disks on the physical host. It is quite crucial and quite often not dimensioned properly.

    Some numbers from our environment (running ESX version 4 and using a SAN) - : When I compile I get an average of 15000 context switching/sec on vmware, and on a three year old physical server I get about 65000.... This is only one measure point though. In english this means compiling the entire application takes 2 hours and 10 minutes on a virtual box, and about 55 minutes on the physical server (and both running db on the same physical SQL 2008 cluster).

    We are also running a fully virtual Citrix farm using Xenapp 6. This works fine with the AX client apart from excel imports and exports which are very slow.

  • Suggested answer
    David Keding Profile Picture
    David Keding on at

    Just to update this thread. If you are in the position to choose from virtual vs. physical I think you do have enough information on this currently.

    If you are still going virtual and can choose between Hyper-V and VMware then I think that Joeren's numbers certainly is enough of an answer (or as good as it gets right now).

    For us who still are not happy about this (likely due to existing investments) -  I am currently testing running one AOS only vmware running WIN2008R2 on a new ESX4.1 server running late model hardware. I will only compare one thing - and that is to compile the same application. I will post  my results here.

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