Does anyone run Kinetic on-premises in a cluster? A while ago we were strongly discouraged from running Epicor VMs in a cluster by an Epicor employee. We’re reconsidering that because of the benefits of clustering and because we’re not sure how Epicor could be adversely impacted by a cluster since it won’t even be “aware” it is in one. Any shared experiences or expertise would be appreciated.
Depends on how many users you have. And where Epicor is relative to your users. Do you have a large number of uses across multiple sites? Or is everything in one place with only a few users?
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I heard you can even run it in a Linux container 
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We are licensed for something like 35 full users and 15 data collection. We have multiple sites but haven’t seen any negative impact from running as is on a traditional host. Is there something negative about increasing user count and clustering you are aware of?
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How many users are you talking? I don’t see the need and we’re 70 Full 20 Data Collection.
Edit should of read the whole thread 
I wouldn’t setup clustering for that number of users. You won’t see much benefit and the overhead to maintain it wouldn’t be worth it.
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35 full / 15 data. That will increase in the future but not significantly.
And to clarify, we’re not necessarily looking for the performance improvements of a cluster so much as the ability to avoid downtime by running Epicor in a cluster and migrating its VMs off a node that is about to experience downtime as a result of maintenance or something else.
Also, we already have a cluster, Epicor just is not on it yet.
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Correct me if I’m misunderstanding here, but when you refer to “cluster” are talking about a Virtualization Cluster (VMware ,Hyper-V or whatever else)? If so, we’ve been running Epicor on-prem for years as virtualized machines and have not seen any obvious or negative impact that is a direct result of the software running on a VM version a physical server. I’m making several assumptions that your virtualized cluster meets the requirements in the hardware sizing guide (which does include a virtualized deployment option).
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I’ve no idea about on-prem epicor setup but assume you mean Win server failover cluster service or the like. If so, it should be transparent to nodes as you said but if it were me, I’d be darn sure the software provider supports the configuration.
I once was subcontracted to setup sql server database mirroring for a big corp. middle man knew how to land deals but not much about the tech and held the relationship close to the point of I just do what I’m told. Anyway, job done, on time on budget. demonstrated failover successfully. My scope is complete and delivered.
thats when the customer finds out their client software doesn’t support failover partner. They pay the bill, guy blames me and skips town, I get stiffed. Oh well.
Anyway that was when failover had a client dependency. WSFC was later developed to make it transparent AFAIK but do your homework.
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We run our instance with 700+ users behind a Load Balancer with 3 app servers. Works great, except for the part where the load balancer is kind of a dumb traffic cop and doesn’t always know when one of the app servers is down.
To be honest for 35 users seems like way over kill
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Good question. What exactly are we referring too here. “Cluster” could mean a couple different things.
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I work with some talented folks who know this better than I do, but here goes: my question pertains to running an Epicor App VM and Epicor SQL VM on a Windows Hyper-V cluster with multiple hosts/nodes whose resources are not pooled except for storage and that allow for live migration.
Again, I’m not asking about whether we should do this for performance gains (sorry I wasn’t more clear about this in my original post). For convenience reasons alone that are specific to our infrastructure, we are considering migrating our existing Epicor VMs to a new server that is already configured as the cluster described above. That’s probably as much info as I can offer publicly, so I completely understand any response identifying that without even more detail it’s difficult to answer the original question. And thanks everyone who has chimed in! Great community around these parts 
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In that case what you are asking about is running Epicor as “Virtualized machines” which is an option Epicor allows for and provides information on in their Hardware Sizing Guide to ensure that how you configure it is correct to ensure performance is not compromised (assuming the environment runs exactly as they expect it to which is never true). The team managing that cluster should be able to monitor and tune for performance but going back to your original question. What I’m referring to, and I’m pretty sure Jose as well, is On premise “virtualized appservers” in a Hyper-v/VMware Cluster. We’ve been doing it for nearly 10 years, had it originally on dedicated physical servers (back when we were on Epicor 9) and we’ve never seen a reason or need to return back to physical dedicated App or Database servers.
All this said, there are assumptions being made that the Virtualized Cluster is sufficient in terms of it’s resource capacity and configuration and that’s where the hardware sizing guide is a good starting point. I should also add that our environment is about 3-4 times the size you described.
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We run Kinetic on a cluster. I’m trying to do a performance review in the future because something is off, but it’s not determined that it’s a result of the cluster… it’s most likely the way we have the storage set up and networked… it might not be ideal. If you do find out something about a cluster that has something to do with the performance, would you let me know?
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Thanks @regency-mho, I think your response was the affirmation I needed to feel confident attempting to migrated the VMs to our cluster.
@utaylor i can absolutely follow up if we experience any hiccups. It just wont be anytime soon I don’t think.
We’ve run Epicor on VMs since day 1. The only physical server we have is our SQL server. Our app server have always been VMs and we’ve never had issues. Epicor runs fine on VMs. Just make sure they are sized right.
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One thing we did as well to set a simple baseline was use the PDT tool. It’s only going to give to some basic benchmarking but we found it was helpful to that we had at least a similar or better performing configuration as a starting point before we added user load and other factors which would influence performance. We’ve done the same when we have major infrastructure changes like replacing the backend storage or virtualization host hardware etc. To date, any performance issues we’ve experienced have mostly been unrelated to running the servers in a virtualized configuration OR we had to make some adjustments to resource allocation given to the VMs in response to a growing userbase.
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Thanks, we’re exploring that tool right now.
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There is the performance tuning guide which is a useful to to get started with and helps you set some base lines using a known database.
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