Three Questions About Virtualizing Patron Edge

I've been on upgrade planning calls with about a dozen organizations in the last few weeks, and several have asked about putting Patron Edge in a virtual environment. Three questions have come up repeatedly and I want to address them and give some food for thought when planning your next server hardware purchase.

Will it work? - The Patron Edge Quality Assurance team and several members of our Support team use VMWare to test multiple versions of PE at once, and it works perfectly. Keep in mind this is for the server side of things. While a virtualization solution will do fine on workstations as far as the program is concerned, I can't guarantee that your printers/scanners/card swipes will work flawlessly.

Is it slow? - In-house, I haven't seen a performance difference between a physical server and a virtual server with the same system specs. Several organizations currently use VirtualBox or VMWare because they can buy extremely fast servers and then split resources over several virtual machines. The bottleneck of a virtual machine setup is the hard disk, so be sure to read up on best practices to keep your virtual machines running as fast as possible.

Is it supported? - Server-side, it's absolutely supported as long as the virtual machine meets our system requirements. Currently, at least one organization has a fully-loaded server with a fast Linux distribution installed. They put Patron Edge and their other enterprise programs on virtual servers.

Supportability is only an issue is on the workstation side, and that is because we don't test peripherals on virtual machines. I have seen a Macbook, with a Datamax printer connected, running Patron Edge through VMWare Fusion and printing tickets without any issues. But if the printer didn't work in that setup, my Support team wouldn't be able to assist since we don't have that kind of computer hardware and it wasn't verified as working by the Quality Assurance team.

What other questions do you have about putting your Blackbaud products in a virtual environment? Have you been doing it for a while at your own organization? Leave a note for others in the comments.