HomeSage Timberline running on VMware ESX 4
A few months ago I started the process of getting all my ducks in a row for a migration that involved moving all physical servers a customer had to a VMware ESX environment. This environment wasn’t anything special: 60 users running Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange 2003, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Sage Timberline Office as their accounting app.
The Microsoft parts were easy. I was sure there would be no problem those. My one concern was with the Sage Timberline software package. This program never ran particularly well, and its obvious it is running using very old programming languages much like alot of the LOB apps companies use these days.
I needed to make sure this package would both a) run within a VMware environment and b) be supported by Sage from a technical perspective. When I called the Sage Customer Support desk and asked their response was:
Sage Timberline Office is not supported running as a virtual machine, however we will troubleshoot any issues you have to a reasonable extent, while not allowing any support calls to be escalated to the engineering department.”
That actually sounds pretty fair. The woman I spoke with sounded fairly knowledgable about the Sage product and had been one of the technicians to previously work with another Sage customer that had issues running their software in a virtual environment. I asked her what the specific issues encountered were and all she really could tell me was that the Pervasive Database performed very badly and lots of unexpected things would happen while using the software.
So here I was – ready to get a signature for a proposal that would cost my customer 10’s of thousands of dollars and I had no factual evidence that showed that the accounting package they used would even work. If there were ever going to be a problem with this software it would be related to performance alone, right? There only about 10 users that access this application, so that shouldn’t really be an issue, right?
Well it turns out Sage Timberline Accounting software runs just fine in a virtual environment. It runs better running in VMware ESX 4 than it ever did on its own dedicated Dell Poweredge 1650 with RAID5.
I guess the moral of the story is that if it should work and it isn’t, you’re probably doing something wrong. Fight through the problems with a sense of resolve, do your research, follow guidelines and procedures and most things will run just fine in a virtual environment….and never take no for an answer.
