Performance tuning your Sage X3 system: Operating System

2 minute read time.

Updated: 13 December 2022

Please note this document and all other documents it links to are living documents so will evolve over time as new things are discovered, new functionality is provided, best practises adjusted and/or when I get time to add content; so please make sure you come back and visit this source document often.

Introduction

Virtualisation technologies

Hardware

General blogs, KB articles, etc.

Operating Systems

Introduction

Sage Support team are likely not going to be best placed to provide best and specific advice about hardware, operating systems nor virtualisation technologies, however these components cannot be ignored when looking at performance and will often be the first point of call when trying to identify where a performance bottleneck is. You should employ your in-house expertise or specialist partner when looking at these areas, however having said that I can share some knowledge in this article. If advice is needed regarding hardware sizing, or operating system tuning the Sage Center of Excellence and Expertise team are well placed to assist.

Virtualisation technologies

Tuning the operating systems these days often needs to start with looking at any Virtualisation technology that may be in use, as if being used this will add another layer of complexity that is invisible from the underlying operating system itself. When looking at performance issues, make sure you have confirmed the physical hardware is performing well before looking at Virtual Servers. One example previously identified for VMWare was excessive “ballooning”, discussed in http://www.vmwarearena.com/vmware-memory-management-part-3-memory-ballooning/

There have been reports with customers using VEEAM whereby Sage X3 sessions experience intermittent disconnects/crashes. VEEAM freezes a VM for a few seconds when taking snapshots, which was found to sometimes cause this situation, but can also happen when deleting snapshots which is described in https://www.veeam.com/kb1681

Hardware

It is useful to understand the hardware specification for each server being used for Sage X3 components (these comments are mostly from Sage Center of Excellence team):

Clock speed matters, but also L3 cache. Can use 7-Zip benchmark test to get feel of raw power.
With VMware found 4-8 CPU per VM gives best performance.