Running JIRA on a VM

Question

Anyone have any success or failure running Jira on a VM?

I am setting up a new source control and defect tracking server. My server room is near full and my services group suggested a VM. I saw that a bunch of people are running SVN on VM (including NCSA). The VM would also free me from hardware problems and give me high availability. Finally, it frees me from some red tape and it can be implemented faster.

So, does anyone know of any reason why I shouldn't put Jira on a VM?

Thanks

Answer 1

We just did the research for this, this is what we found:

• If you are planning to have a small number of projects (10-20) with 1,000 to 5,000 issues in total and about 100-200 users, a recent server (2.8+GHz CPU) with 256-512MB of available RAM should cater for your needs.
• If you are planning for a greater number of issues and users, adding more memory will help. We have reports that allocating 1GB of RAM to JIRA is sufficient for 100,000 issues.
• For reference, Atlassian's JIRA site (http://jira.atlassian.com/) has over 33,000 issues and over 30,000 user accounts. The system runs on a 64bit Quad processor. The server has 4 GB of memory with 1 GB dedicated to JIRA.

For our installation (<10000 issues, <20 concurrent sessions at a time) we use very little server resources (<1GB Ram, running on a quad-core processor we typically use <5% with <30% peak), and VM didn't impact performance in any measurable ammount.

Answer 2

I don't see why you shouldn't run jira off a vm - but jira needs a good amount of resources, and if your vm resides on a heavily loaded machine, it may exhibit poor performance. Why not log a support request (support.atlassian.com) and ask?

Answer 3

We run Jira on a virtual machine - VMWare running Windows Server 2003 SE and storing data on our SQL Server 2000 server. No problems, works well.