Our IT Dept. is looking into using Virtual Servers for our LBI implementation. Has anyone set-up LBI like this? if so did you use a separate servers for RS,EFS, and Smart Notes??

Also- has anyone ever stress-tested LBI? If so did you use a testing script or did you rely on end-users?

Thanks for any help you can provide

LBI on vm is not supported for Production. Regarding dev/test servers...the response I got regarding Lawson support of LBI 9 on vm (vmware specifically)...

Lawson Business Intelligence (LBI) Support on VMWare
Lawson provides support for the following types of issues with its LBI products when running on VMWare:
If a functional issue occurs on a computer running VMWare, it will be supported if it can be reproduced by Lawson inside and outside the VMWare environment.
If a performance issue occurs on a computer running VMWare, it will be supported if it can be reproduced by Lawson outside the VMWare environment.
Other issues: No support is provided.

I suspect that if you do install LBI on a vm, your biggest issue will be memory constraints.

Regarding stress testing LBI, I've used scripts with LoadRunner.

Lawson does not support VM right now unfortunately. They really need to start working on it as Websphere is already certified for VM use....

We "went live" at the beginning of September and have been running LBI fine since then. Is our years'-worth of experience enough for you? Here's more:

Go for it! We have been using LBI on 3 VMWare virtual servers since late last year. One server each for Production, Test, and Development. EFS, ERS, and SN all located on the same server.

Issues with the underlying VMWare are treated just like issues with an actual PC. Lawson won't support you if you have server problems with a "real" box either! So you have to have server support from a non-Lawson source -- either a Windows Admin for a real PC, or someone who knows VMWare for that product.

We've had a few problems with the VMWare servers crashing on their own. Same thing as a PC server crashing, the support guys get them running, fixed the underlying problem, then we're back in business.

Oh, and BTW, we're not using physical disks for storage, we're using SAN storage, an EMC box. So our virtual servers have virtual memory too. Talk about wierd. And it all works fine! :coffee:

Wow. That's great to hear. I want nothing more than to move many of my physical boxes to virtual. And we have the same thing with SAN storage. But I did run into this situation with Lawson were our physical server for MSCM crashed and I copied over our test setup to a virtual machine to get up and running.

For the most part it was fine but it wasn't doing one important function correctly. When lawson found out that it was virtual server - they would have part of it. So while they don't normally deal with server issues per se they still would help if their software isn't working on that server and figure out a solution.

We have LBI running on a MicroSoft virtual server and it doesn't seem to be causing any problems.

I don't know which flavor of MS virtual server we run, but it is hosted on a Dell blade server.