My company is new to Epicor ERP 10.
Want to ask what the best practice would be for Production, Test and Development and anyone able to tell me what the license entitlement would be.
I come from an Infor LN background.
So we practiced
Virtual Machine 1 / Production: App + MSSQL Instace
VM 2 / Test: Test App + MSSQL Instance
VM 3 / Dev: DEV App + MSSQL Instance
In total requires 3 Windows OS VMs & 3 MSSQL Instances for that Infor ERP.
Based on the installation and reference guide.
My example I’m taking a simple small user base.
You have 1 VM with multiple Application Servers and 1 sql instance with 4 databases (Production, Test, Pilot and Development) as per the architecture guide. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Is this correct practice? Because based on this setup. We would save on OS and DB licensing but application of OS & DB Level patches directly impacts production environment. IE: Can’t really validate OS and DB patch before roll out.
We also tested cloning a ERP10 VM with a licenae via Hyper-V and could get it to work. The license isn’t tied to the Mac address or a hostname so technically can run multiple instances but is this compliant or its an additional charge?
My previous ERP experience was having to clone/restore the test VM from the production environment was better due to having online backups and ability to test DB and OS updates.
I think ‘correct’ is based on what you want to manage, but you’ve hit upon a primary concern with patching on single machine. But you should understand that ‘installing’ a version or patch does not update/alter the appservers or database - it just makes it available to the Appservers/DBs through the Admin Console. Each appserver can have it’s own patch level applied (as long as the database it’s talking to is equally patched). There are many of folks here who have a lot of appservers and DB’s installed in a VM b/c they support customers/sites around the world.
You can certainly do it on one VM like you’ve asked, but personally I would not. In our scenario:
We have Appservers for each environment, but we also have a Datacenter license, so we can spin up as many VMs on the host that we care to have. This allows me to have a backup appserver for Prod, as well as a dedicated appservers for 3rd party stuff like AFR, EDA, Infoworker, etc. Patching everything is a bit tedious though…
We have a single SQL server. We have a Prod DB with log backups every 30 minutes going to another storage location, and backups of the other DBs every night. We also have a snapshot of the SQL server VM always ready to go back to (and reload the DB’s) if there is an issue instead of having a second SQL server. The recovery window (versus a second SQL Server license) was deemed acceptable.
Thanks for sharing your inforomation Makes sense on having the multi VM’s and saving costs on the DB side. You’re right in saying definition of ‘Correct’.
Some previous ERP experience did have an encounter with an OS level patch cooking the Application good and well. Thanksfully Virtual Machine Backups are a godsend.
Admittedly we do have an issue with VM Sprawl on our other ERP software because we did have customers on various versions of OS/DB/Application so it became 1 VM per customer. Might be having to rethink our approach for Epicor since the Application Server construct will help consolidate to a fewer VM’s.
Hopefully there are others can chime in to see what kind of setups are out there.