WaterGems and MS App-V(irtualization) - Compatibility?

Hi Ben,

I agree with your points about the challenges with using Bentley's Water products (including WaterGEMS) in a virtualized environment. It's possible that the errors you reported are due to issues with how your ICT team configured the virtualized environment.

It may be a matter of explaining to the IT services team what you've noted on why it's best to install our products on the client computer instead of attempting virtualization.

... may be setting up a .bat file for silent installation save some time and research.

KB 79320 may help if your ICT plans to go this route.

I took a quick look at some articles on Microsoft App-V and agree with Jesse that WaterGEMS will not function that way mostly due to our integration with other platforms, but depending on the mode of virtualization I would also be concerned about performance implications associated with computing large models such as yours Ben.

Also you are right, I can't see this working well with our hot-fix model unless your IT people are responsive and keep the server side image up to date and let's face it, in my opinion they are probably only using a system like Microsoft App-V so they can all go home at 5pm so my bet is they probably will have some issue with patching and/or the diagnostic process that we use.

Wayne et. al. -  Thanks for this discussion about virtualization and what the product can and can't do.  Even as a small business owner, the struggle exists on how and who has access and the limitations with business infrastructure.  Knowing information like this helps base my decisions moving forward.  I myself am having this thought of going to virtual terminals because as powerful products like this evolve, more base information is encouraged and welcomed to help generate a solid model and/or presentation which is starting to eclipse the capabilities of most business/CAD level desktops.  In some cases, quad core processors just can't do it or can but run the risk of melting (hence why I am looking at virtualization).  So the question becomes do I spend 2x as much on business infrastructure so that I can utilize the software as it evolves or do I simply stop subscribing and either sell out or stop subscription so that I don't sacrifice performance now and loss of production because my equipment can't keep up with the software?   This isn't a Bentley issue but all forms of powerful business class software like Exchange, Intuit, Thermo Scientific, etc.  

Hi nkg2,

You make some interesting points and I can understand where you are coming from!

Firstly, let me preface this reply with the fact that I am no expert in virtualization and am not qualified to make any recommendations in this subject matter! I do, however, have some general experience with virtualization and am able to offer some thoughts about it in general and also how it relates to WaterGEMS (something I do know a little bit about!)

So moving on, I guess we should clarify what we mean by virtualization. In this instance the MS App-V appears to me to be a system whereby an application is essentially hosted from a server and the services it requires to operate on an end user's system are also virtualized (e.g., registry access etc). This appears, from what I have read, to have the effect of isolating the application from other parts of the client system and in effect running the application in a sand-box. This I suspect would be quite fine for WaterGEMS stand-alone, but the problem comes in where platforms are concerned (WaterGEMS can no longer interact with other installed programs due to the way it would have been isolated from the rest of the system.) I made my earlier comment about performance based on the "streaming" aspect of MS App-V, but it seems that there are several different configurations that go along with it, so as long as WaterGEMS is executed locally and can get access to the full CPU/disk access of the end user system it would probably be fine.

In terms of hardware requirements, WaterGEMS (stand alone) is still relatively easy going IMHO, and can still be run on relatively cheap desktop systems. I don't envisage that the hardware requirements for the software are going to jump significantly in any forthcoming release, but I cannot obviously guarantee this in the long term without a crystal ball by my side! What I do know is that in the latest WaterGEMS release (SS4) we did do work to improve overall application performance on existing hardware by changing our database backend to a different technology. Now model sizes are smaller and the majority of performance scenarios execute faster on the same hardware. In the next release we will be spending time on improving performance in other areas. So for the short term at least I believe the opposite is true for WaterGEMS in that it should be able to be run on lesser hardware now, compared to the previous release. :)

I also want to throw out there that there are other virtualization solutions available aside from MS APP-V. Again I guess it all depends on what you are trying to achieve by virtualizing, but solutions that virtualize the entire operating system (of which there are many out there) as opposed to trying to virtualize a single application (new to me personally), don't have the same limitations as the application specific virtualization appears to have. To that end you could virtualize a complete desktop environment with interacting programs, run it on dedicated hardware and have lesser powered client systems connect to the virtualized environment. As far as the software installations go they all work because they get installed on to and operate on what appears to be a regular system and so this method of virtualization offers a lot less technological resistance IMHO.

In terms of performance of full system virtualization I think it's pretty good. In fact I have a lot of experience using virtualized systems of this nature. I have been using virtualization exclusively for the last couple of years to do everything that I do, including writing this reply! I run WaterGEMS on a virtual system with only 2GB of RAM (although I could allocate more if I needed to) and it runs well even with large models. I do all my development on some other virtualized systems, and I do e-mail and admin tasks on another. I currently have over 40 different virtualized systems that I use for one purpose or another.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that you did mention that this is not just something specific to WaterGEMS or even Bentley and as far as that goes I am sure there are some applications out there that are just going to continue to get hungrier and hungrier as time goes on. I guess at that point it becomes a numbers game in that you still probably have the same number of end users to service, so it becomes the cost of hardware for those end users (and the necessity to upgrade) or the cost of server systems that can also keep up with the combined workload (and the associated network infrastructure). Again I know next to nothing about MS App-V but it's my understanding that lots of large businesses are running servers with full virtualized systems (or virtualized servers) on them and if they need to expand in future they merely buy a new server and move one or more virtualized systems/servers over to the new real physical server and keep on trucking. I'm not sure how that model works with the application specific virtualization, but I guess it would be a similar process or sharing the load amongst multiple servers.