We're a Hyper-V shop, but regardless Sage CRE runs fine virtualized. We started with 9.8 in 2013, having tested in 2012, and every version since has been installed to a new server and the data migrated over. 

A clean OS install (with UEFI BIOS) is very much preferred to a P2V of an existing server. 

Hopefully you have vSphere Essentials or better, so your backup API is enabled and you can automate the backup of the entire VM. I do a local Sage backup to a separate virtual disk and then back that up as well. We use Veeam.

There are things you can do to improve performance of Sage but it is hamstrung by the legacy Pervasive database. I've hosted the server VM on SSD's since 2013, first on a RAID10 of four SSD's and since 2015 on a RAID5 of 8 SSD's. Mechanical drives should be avoided for database applications and anything that is latency sensitive.

So much of what happens on the server side is single threaded, I've moved to buying the highest clock speed Xeons I can afford (Gold in the current model lineup). Windows Server licensing favors 16 cores or less, and with two 8 core Xeons that turbo to 3.7 GHz, we've found 4 vCPU's to be as much can be used.

32GB of RAM seems to be OK as there is a "60% of RAM but don't go over 18GB in use" rule I have in my notes from going to Pervasive 12 64-bit. You'll see a lot of unused RAM, it's really frustrating.

We're a Hyper-V shop, but regardless Sage CRE runs fine virtualized. We started with 9.8 in 2013, having tested in 2012, and every version since has been installed to a new server and the data migrated over. 

A clean OS install (with UEFI BIOS) is very much preferred to a P2V of an existing server. 

Hopefully you have vSphere Essentials or better, so your backup API is enabled and you can automate the backup of the entire VM. I do a local Sage backup to a separate virtual disk and then back that up as well. We use Veeam.

There are things you can do to improve performance of Sage but it is hamstrung by the legacy Pervasive database. I've hosted the server VM on SSD's since 2013, first on a RAID10 of four SSD's and since 2015 on a RAID5 of 8 SSD's. Mechanical drives should be avoided for database applications and anything that is latency sensitive.

So much of what happens on the server side is single threaded, I've moved to buying the highest clock speed Xeons I can afford (Gold in the current model lineup). Windows Server licensing favors 16 cores or less, and with two 8 core Xeons that turbo to 3.7 GHz, we've found 4 vCPU's to be as much can be used.

32GB of RAM seems to be OK as there is a "60% of RAM but don't go over 18GB in use" rule I have in my notes from going to Pervasive 12 64-bit. You'll see a lot of unused RAM, it's really frustrating.

Brian,

We will be going with vSphere Essentials Plus, and I agree that the underlying Pervasive database is the core of the speed issues with CRE as it is difficult to get 64bit performance from a 32bit app, and going the virtual route seemed to be one options to improve the performance. Thanks for your insight i will keep all of it in mind during this process.

Well, the current server side Pervasive install is 64-bit, but the engine doesn't seem to make very good use of the resources available. One performance hack support had me try was installing the 64-bit engine on our RDS server. If there was any positive impact, it was very hard to discern.