So, I have had this conversation with my client multiple times, they are stubborn. I have told them that
FMS 17 needs to be on a standalone server, they insist on running it on a virtual server. There are speed
issues.
So can FileMaker Server 17 run on a virtual server?
Thank you in advance for your replies.
Bill
Is there a recommended configuration? Currently all I know is VM server and 2 cores.
Thanks Julio
These are the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for on-premise hardware:
Technical Specifications | FileMaker Server 17
And some considerations for your particular needs:
General hardware considerations for FileMaker Server
On AWS, for example, these configurations would map out to something like a general purpose t2.medium or t2.large instance with an 80GB boot volume.
The same best practices apply with respect to things like separating the OS and Data drives, setting up an attached backup drive, securing the machine, and installing/configuring an SSL cert.
Best Practices for Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
FM Server runs perfectly fine in a virtual machine. And why shouldn't it?
We are running our server on ESX(i) for about the last decade or even longer without any problems at all (50+ users)
Today I wouldn't run anything on bare-metal anymore if not absolutely necessary - and with FM server it certainly is not.
Only because anything on FM's site says a standalone server and nothing about a virtual server. Which speaks to the challenge in finding information about things like this on the site. Thanks to Julio and supporting my question with links. It is truly appreciated.
You're welcome.
While there may be very little on FM's actual Knowledge Base articles regarding specifics for hosting on a VM, but there is quite a bit of information out there, particularly on YouTube and the like.
If you are considering hosting on AWS, I would recommend FileMaker Cloud over FileMaker Server. IMO, for many use cases the security, stability and robustness of a Linux-based AWS Cloud Formation outweighs any potential downsides when compared to setting up your own instance of FileMaker Server.
wcallman wrote:
Only because anything on FM's site says a standalone server and nothing about a virtual server. Which speaks to the challenge in finding information about things like this on the site. Thanks to Julio and supporting my question with links. It is truly appreciated.
One thing that is confusing is that FileMaker licensing documentation specifically mentions running on a "dedicated" server. This is not "dedicated" in terms of "Virtual Server" or "dedicated server" as server hosts talk about it, it is dedicated in that the server is not shared between multiple clients/businesses.
Properly set up virtual servers run the same as dedicated servers with the resources supplied. Personally IMO words to watch out for when looking at a host are "burstable RAM", you really want dedicated RAM IMO for FMServer. E.g. if your server needs to use that RAM then you want it to be reliably there, consider the "burstable" part of the RAM to not be there because services will shut down if your server goes to use that burstable RAM and someone else has already grabbed it.
As far as speed issues go make sure you have guaranteed CPU share, and find out what you can about the storage, your storage IOPS matters... You don't want storage that is shared over too many virtual servers.
A couple of things worth emphasising to add to the good advice you’ve received above.
First off, a virtual machine doesn’t have to be hosted on the Internet, it can be a VM on a server located on the LAN. Should you host on the Internet then the main factors that are likely to affect performance are your Internet connection bandwidth and the design of your database.
Secondly, the ‘dedicated server’ has 2 meanings, which are touched on above. One is licensing that prevents companies providing FileMaker hosting from sharing the cost across multiple companies, each server must only serve one customer (with a caveat relating to FileMaker SBAs, but this isn’t relevant here). The other is that, ideally, the server should not be providing other network services, but be dedicated to running FileMaker Server.
Regards
Andy
Can anyone who is running a FMS in a Windows VM talk about what OS you are running on the hardware and what App you are running the virtual machine in? Any other details would be appreciated. Thanks in advance
VMware (see ESXi) is a big player in this area, Windows has its own hypervisor (Hypervisor - Wikipedia ).
Most of the OSes for the VMs running on physical host are going to be Windows and Linux. Which means that for FMS it really is Windows only in the virtual world.
Apple allows virtualization of its OS only on Apple hardware, so it is do-able there but Apple doesn't really have really good hardware to run the hypervisor on.
I have run FileMaker Server 14, 15 and now 17 on Windows Server VMs on the Windows Server with Microsoft's "Hyper-V" as the virtualisation controller. There have been no FileMaker-specific issues apart from making sure the VM is configured with sufficient RAM as its start-up allocation. In Hyper-V, VMs are configured with their total RAM and also a startup allocation - and we found that increasing this to half the total RAM value made startup more reliable.
There have been occasional issues that have affected all VMs on the host (host storage controller-related) that cause slowdowns on all VMs on the host, but no FileMaker-specific issues. As long as you have allocated sufficient startup RAM and the storage performance is good, you should be fine.
Also take a look at Proxmox which is another Linux based hypervisor. This is a full featured product which include clustering, live migrations etc which you would normally pay good money for with VMware. It also lets you use containers similar to VMware's Photon OS.
FileMaker Server 17 can and does run quite well on a virtual server, provided your virtual machine meets recommended configuration.
There are many of us in this community running both FileMaker Server instances on AWS, Azure, and other public cloud shrives. And also Filemaker Cloud instances on AWS.
It can work, but it all depends on your customer's requirements and the VM configuration.