Anyone has experience in moving Epicor to company azure cloud environment (VMs/servers)? Thanks.
There are several. There are even companies that specialize in hosting Epicor in Azure which can easily be found via Google.
We just migrated our on-prem servers into the Azure cloud (non-Epicor hosted) over Memorial weekend.
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Hi Aaron,
How many users do you have? and How is the performance. Did you get help/support from Epicor? Thanks.
Probably around 50-60 full users and 20ish MES users at any given time.
Performance obviously took a hit from being on-prem, but it’s still very much usable; our testing showed a max performance degradation of about 30%, but it’s closer to 15% on average.
No, we did everything ourselves.
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A 30% performance DECREASE? Whoa. Are you running the client locally? Have you considered using RDS?
30% at it’s very worst. We did slightly unrealistic load testing.
We went from an order line taking 3 seconds to create (lots of BPMs there) to about 3.5 seconds. It’s really not as bad as the numbers sound.
We run locally; considered RDS, but management didn’t want to deal with that.
How long have you taken to complete the migration?
Ok that doesn’t sound as bad lol, but man these days you just install the RDS role in a few clicks, publish the Epicor exe, point your users to the web portal then bam you are up and running with the added benefit of a faster connection between the clients and servers.
It can make for quicker updates too, not having to re-deploy the client everywhere or messing about with auto-update scripts 
I digress.
We should be moving to Azue here soon and I wont tolerate any performance decrease, only an increase will all the compute and machine learning capabilities Azure has to offer lol and will be using RDS
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Took maybe 4 hours on the go-live weekend. Longest time was moving the database backup file over to the cloud.
There is probably another option depending on your current licensing. We are looking at Windows Virtual Desktop to run the Epicor Client - especially for Europe and Asia. If you are a Microsoft 365 user, the WVD is included - other typical Azure charges still apply. Could save some money over RDS.
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Thanks Mark,
We also are investigating going with Microsoft 365, good catch!
I am going in the opposite direction soon, am building a new VMWare box to pull Epicor out of Azure to be on-prem. You mention a 30% performance hit. That’s exactly why it’s going back to on-prem, they want better performance. And to be not dependent on the local ISP for the company to operate.
Kind of late to ask but no thought of using Azure Express Route to improve the local connection?
Separate from @aaronssh, performance is measured in a couple of places. While the UI is slower, I find our MRP and other Tasks to be much faster - even than when we were in RackSpace. We’ll find the ways to make the UI faster while we wait for Kinetic. We can’t do a worldwide operation on prem without spending a lot more money. Every company is different.
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I dont have alot of personal experience here, however I was talking with someone yesterday who has recently migrated their epicor to their own AWS. The performance is surprisingly bad.
I can confirm a performance reduction of this level, having run E10 on bare metal, internally hosted VM’s and now Azure. Azure by far is the worst for performance. That being said, it may still meet your performance requirements. Not sure to tell you how to determine that effectively tho…
Can anyone comment on the nitty-gritty details of why Azure would be slower compared to on-prem? Specifically if one is to use remote access to a server that resides in your Tenant? I can understand a performance hit if running the client locally from your organization due to network shenanigans, but what if the client server is in Azure along with the app/db servers?
I’ll echo @Chris_Conn here, you’ll definitely see a reduction in user-perceived performance when you do a lift-and-shift to any cloud - that’s for any multi-tier application and not just Epicor. The current framework was not designed with the Cloud in mind and you really feel it on the thick client - especially Active Home Page. There’s just a lot going on. I believe this will change as more of the UI is Kineticized.
As @jgehling mentioned, using a client in the cloud gives one a MUCH better experience. You still have to optimize your application/database servers as you would on-prem. We see the performance penalty dropping as time goes on while we keep the other benefits of being in the Cloud (security, flexible resources, business continuity, etc.)
Mark W.
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BTW, there’s going to be an AMA in ten minutes about WVD for those interested in Windows Virtual Desktop:
So do you have your whole desktop in the cloud or is there just a window containing a “view” of an Epicor Client running in Azure?