Greetings All!

The company I'm working for is looking at moving from an HP-UX 10.20/Oracle 7.34/Baan IVc3 environment, to a Windows 2000 Server/MS-SQL 2000 Standard Edition/Baan IVc4 environment. We currently support 30 Baan seats in this environment, and don't expect a lot of growth in this area. Also, a small number of these users will access the Baan application via a Citrix XP Metaframe server.

For the hardware, the Baan consultants that we've talked to are recommending a Dell Poweredge 6650 with dual 2.0 GHz Xeon processors, 2GB RAM, and 160GB of Raid5 disk storage.

I'm curious if anyone on the Baanboard has attempted this type of conversion, and what, if any, problems were encountered during the conversion. I'm also interested in any real world experiences related to application performance in this type of environment.

In addition to the above, I have the following questions.

1.) Does it make sense to purchase a server with more than the
standard amount of Level 3 cache? I believe that in some
database environments, hardware-level caching isn't utilized
because of the way the database was designed and
concerns about dirty writes.

2.) Has anyone encountered any problems running MS-SQL
in a Baan environment? I'm asking this question because I
understand that MS-SQL is one of the latest database
offerings to be added to the Baan environment.

3.) Our current Baan environment includes personalizations.
Are there any issues related to moving these to the new
Baan environment?

Well, that's about all I can come up with for now. All responses
are greatly appreciated! Thanks much!!!

I can't answer about the conversion but I can tell you our experience of what you are looking to move to.

We have a approx. 30 concurrent users (with 6 of them running pcf) on 4c4, win 2000, sql 2000.
Our server is a Compaq Proliant 6000 with 4 x Xeon 1MB 400MHz processors. RAM is 2GB. Disk space is split across a number of arrays 18Gb mirrored for System, 18Gb mirrored for Baan application, 4Gb mirrored for database logs and c.50Gb RAID 5 for database. The server has redundant RAID controllers and other components.

I think our system has a reasonable response level and performance. MS SQL has been available on Baan for 4+ years so it is pretty stable(except on SQL6.5!).

Issues to consider:

would you be better off buying 4 x slightly lower GHz Xeon processors rather than having 2 x 2GHz?

you won't currently get support for a level 2 driver on SQL + Baan4.

Terry, I have just completed an installation of Triton to BaanERP5c using a similar setup. The Triton installation was on HP-UX and the new ERP installation is on a 2 Poweredge 2600 - double CPU, 2GIG Ram. One server is the app server and one is the database server. The client had enough cash to buy another 2600 for a development server (app and db on both). There is more than enough power on production and rarely pegs over 30% CPU, so more than eough room for growth. We have a clustered environment on SQL Server. The client has 37 licenses and we share the licenses with a license server (small PC server).

Things to think about:

1. when we started the project, Baan did not offer installation of the software directory to SQL Server 2000. Have to install on 7 and change it later. The direct install on SQL Server 2000 was beta tested as of two months ago and may be available now. Check with Baan as this will be an extra step - plan for this if you are doing a cluster or something out of the ordinary.
2. I would strongly recommend having a separate production and development server if you can afford it. You may want to go down to the Poweredge 2650 (buy a few), since I think it will be more enough power.
3. Having a separate db server and app server I would recommend also.

I think when you price this (you may have already), you will be amazed on what you can get from Dell based on what you were paying on the HP Platform, and how much hardware has come down in price in the past few years (or even the last 8 months).

SQL Server has been running with Baan for a long time now. It is very stable. It does not look like level 2 will be available for BaanIV, but it is supported for BaanERP. We used level 1 for our implementation and still have very good performance.

email me if you need more info.

didn't answer your orther questions:

1. not sure about the L3 cache. probably not required, but if you can afford it, why not do it now. Probably a nice to have.

2. no problems with SQL server that I've seen. Most clients I've dealt with the past year are on SQL Server and quite a few are migrating from other db platforms because of cost.

3. for personalizations, same as any other upgrade. Have to compare any of your customizations to see if there are conflicts with c4 upgrade. c3 to c4 is fairly clean, but this really depends what your customizations are. You will have to move your customizations over to a separate VRC and compare after the upgrade is finished.