Sage 100

Does anyone know of a best practices for MAS 200 on a WIN 2008 Virtual server? Or has someone compiled such a document. I know there are several issues with it - the Keberos setting, the data execution protection (DEP) setting come to mind. One should review the AV setting and ensure that the paperless tweaks are in place. I would not be surprised if there were more. I have a fairly new MAS 200 v4.5.6 install that continues to be a slug. The server still reboots mysteriously on random basis. Crystal reports will zip along only to be crawling five minutes later. PTQ's zip, then crawl. Server has 5.86 GB of memory, 64 OS with an intell Xeon E5606 @ 2.13 ghz. processor. IT staff has the netowrk locked down tighly and won't open it up unless I can give them specific settings to tweak. Thoughts.

What virtualization (VMware, Xen, Hyper-V?) 5.86GB is for the VM or the physical server? When performance slows, what does Task Manager show for the VM in CPU, memory usage? for the Physical server? How many VMs? Are they on separate physical disks? Is anything besides MAS on this VM?

Under Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Advanced tab > Settings button there is a checkbox for Automatically Restart. Uncheck it. Ironically you may need to restart the server for it to take effect. What I'm led to believe is along the same lines as what Phil McIntosh posted. You have almost 6 GB of RAM but is it all allocated to the VM that is running MAS? More importantly the Intex Xeon E5606 processor by default has 4 cores (quad core) and a server system will have either 1 or 2 physical E5606 processors installed (meaning up to 4 or 8 total cores) . Now how many users are running MAS? I have a client who just very recently IT virtualized their physical box into a VM (VMWare 5.1 vSphere) and for 1 week their symptoms were very much like you described in your post. Their 20 users would be running okay then slow down to a crawl. Same with the dozens of business alerts they run and same with the network printing done off that server. When I got to take a look, pvxwin32.exe, das_svc.exe (business alerts), jqs.exe (java quick starter), and other stuff were all spiking the CPU - not anyone in particular and nothing had changed from MAS operational point. It was happening at night even when nobody was in the system and only Biz alerts were running. They would reboot and problem goes away temporarily. I saw the root cause which was prior to virtualization their box (which coincidentally was running EXACTLY the same E5606 but as a single CPU - total of 4 cores) and with a total of 4 GB RAM (can't go higher on Server 2003 32-bit). They were okay for the most part with this although the RAM was insufficient at times. But when IT virtualized it, even though the host system (which was a brand new screaming 2012 server they purchased) had ample processors / cores to spare, they only allocated 1 processor with 2 cores to the MAS guest system. I asked IT to give them back at least 4 cores and everything went back to normal. So like Phil said, you want to ask: * On the host system how many total processors/cores and how much total RAM * On the guest system running MAS, how many processors/cores is allocated and how much RAM is allocated I hope this E5606 is in the dual CPU configuration (8 total cores) so they will have additional to spare.

Thanks Alnoor. At our next admin meeting, I will be recommending that we allocate another five minds to you. This should give you about a third of the collective group mind set.

Amen to that.

You're right @JeffSchwenk - he DOES only exist in the wee hours of the morning....

Here is the configuration at the client. They have 15 MAS licenses. Usually around 10 users on it at any one time. Physical Server: Windows 2008 R2 Cluster with Hyper-V single quad core E5605 2.13 GHZ CPU, 16 GB of RAM Storage: iSCSI Open-E, 1 GB dedicated interface Memory usage of the physical server is about 5.5 GB at this moment. It is hosting a total of 3 Virtual Machines: Domain Controller: 2 virtual processors, 1 GB of RAM MAS server: 4 Virtual Processors, 6 GB of RAM Reports server (or whatever its purpose is) 4 virtual processors, 6 GB of RAM

Confirm there are really 4 cores (virtual processors) running on the Mas server given there are 4 cores to begin with for the whole machine (assuming like you mentioned there is 1 single physical CPU for the whole machine). If you can remote into the Mas server's Task Mgr / Performance tab the number of CPU bar graphs should be 4.