Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 on VMWare

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Posted on by AHSAN MINHAS

Hi,

We recently established our VMWare environment for AX but while putting all best hardware, we found sometime very slow performance. I reviewed all the practices offered by Microsoft even we are higher in specs but I believe this could not solve our problem. I also visited few clients who are using MS AX on Virtual environment and they all faced the same problem. I got a recommendation to move DB (SQL) server from VM to Physical. Will that resolve the issue. We have never gone beyond 75% where CPU or Memory but sometime even on 50% of CPU usage, windows gets hanged. I have installed RDS (Remote Desktop Server) and everyone logs in through RDWEB.

Can anyone who gone through this phase guide me to optimize my environment, We have 5 locations connected through MPLS and each MPLS connectivity is approx 2MB connection.

Regards

Ahsan

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Martin Dráb 237,965 Most Valuable Professional on at

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It depends on what's slow. You mentioned everything from RAN to network and there is no one universal solution. If you have problems with database, moving it to a physical server might help somewhat, but I think you should first review what's slow. I/O speed and disk layout are usually the first things to check.

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Hello

We experiences low performances on AX 2012 R2 environments running on VMware virtual machines too.

As a baseline we created several identical AX environments running on different configurations:

Virtual servers on VMware ESXi 5.1 hosts,
- AOS engine and SQL Server DB engine on virtual machines
- AOS engine and SQL Server DB engine on virtual machines on a tuned virtual environment

Virtual servers on VMware ESXi 6.0 hosts,
AOS engine and SQL Server DB engine on virtual machines,

Physical servers
AOS engine and SQL Server instance on the same server

Hybrid configuration
AOS engine on virtual machines
SQL Server instances on SQL Server.

Without surprises performances were better on physical servers and in the hybrid configuration having SQL Server instance on a physical server.

But: how much better?

We executed identical batches (Full CIL compilations and other batches) on all environments and compared the results:

20 minutes on ESXi5 environment:
9 to 14 minutes on ESXi6 hybrid environment (SQL instance are on a physical server)
8 minutes on the physical server

I will detail this in a dedicated post.

Best regards

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Guy Terry 28,924 Moderator on at

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Hi Florent,

That's some terrific investigation you've done there. Can't wait to see the full results.

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Most of the time the problem is from SQL Server performance, many people don't know the importance of separate the LUN of the DATA file of the LUN of the Log file, if you make this right and have a SAN (Fiber o iSCSI) and use 2 separate physical LUN, don't should had any performance issue, if you don't know this even if you had a power hardware always will suffer from slow in peak times, Microsoft on Hyper V and VMware support AX with no problem since 2008, there is no trick on the installation, the "secret" is to know how the SQL Component work and make your home work in the vmware o hyper v infrastructure.

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Was there ever a dedicated post regarding this issue? I would love to read the results.

Thank you

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A.Prasanna 8,223 on at

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From Network Connectivity ,There are some Features to be Enable or Disable according to your Platform OS if you are using VMXNET3 Adapters as Network Adapters .

As Example in Some OS you have to Disable RSC , Chimney Offloading as You can find as Example on Windows Server 2012R2 , on this Link :lifeofageekadmin.com/network-performance-vmxnet3-windows-server-2012-r2

and other thing Since SQL not Performing well with Hyper Threaded VMs So you can off Hyper Thread Sharing from VM level (If you cannot Disable Hyper threading on HOST)

Create Custom Perfomance Data Collectors for SQL Server (s) to Monitor Disk Que length,

Disk IO , Disk Read /Sec . Disk Write Sec.

Better option is to use Dynamics Perf to capture all issues related.

Hope this information will help.

Thanks & Regards,

Amith Prasanna

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