Thursday, October 30, 2014

Free Acumatica Sandbox

Hi Everyone,

Acumatica team released a marketing document, explaining sandbox usage. What I am really happy about is a clear black and white statement there.

We are not robbing our customers when they decided to use Acumatica sandbox for training, testing, archival purposes. Local sandbox is free of charge.

Would you decide to put it on our cloud, it will have some nominal fees involved, but again, if you need it FOC, install locally and enjoy!

WHAT IS AN ACUMATICA SANDBOX?
An Acumatica Sandbox is a separate instance of your Acumatica environment. You can
do anything you want in the sandbox – all without impacting your current deployment
and your users.

A Smooth Transition For New Rollouts Or New Employees
Leverage an Acumatica Sandbox to give new or existing users a hands-on experience
with Acumatica. Safely verify features and functionality, grant limited access to drive
adoption with power users without impacting other groups of less frequent users, and
also test customizations and integrations before making them live.

A Reliable Development Environment
An Acumatica Sandbox allows you to develop and test new solutions for your
organization in an environment that mirrors your live implementation. This enables
you to test real-world scenarios and involve users from different function areas before
going live.

Sandbox + Snapshot = Peace Of Mind
If you have a Private Cloud sandbox, you can use Acumatica’s advanced snapshot
technology to quickly set up your sandbox. You can take a snapshot of your Acumatica
instance at any time, and restore the downloaded copy to the sandbox environment
which you then manage separately. This enables you to test or modify your current
Acumatica instance without impacting users or your live deployment. Your partner can
help set up your first local instance.

WHICH SANDBOX IS RIGHT FOR ME?
Acumatica offers multiple sandbox options to meet your business requirements.
Whether you have a SaaS, SOP, or perpetual license, you can deploy your sandbox
wherever you prefer.



Thank you Acumatica team!

All the best,

Sergey.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Configuring Affinity Mask at IIS Server. Acumatica CPU Licensing.

Dear Partners,

There were many questions recently on how to properly configure the server to match the license purchased from Acumatica.

Under our VAR agreement, the partner is responsible for proper server configuration. Such if customer bought 4 CPU cores, there must only be 4 CPU cores allocated for the Acumatica on IIS server Application Pool. This is not just a legal requirement, that is stated in our product EULA, this is a subject for Acumatica support eligibility and overall stability of the system. 

To address this important question we should keep in mind:

A. Acumatica License Version

B.A. Acumatica Edition (Departmental 2CPU, Divisional 4CPU or Enterprise 8CPU) for versions prior Acumatica 4 
OR
B.B. Acumatica License Size (S 2CPU, M 4CPU, L 8CPU, XL 16CPU)

C. Number of actual CPU cores at your IIS server

Lets assume few scenarios: 

Scenario 1. Your IIS server is sitting on the same hardware box with the SQL server. Total number of CPU cores at the hardware machine is 8 (Eight). License purchased from Acumatica is Perpetual Departmental, meaning you got license for 2 CPUs only. How should we configure the server?

Vital configuration part in this scenario will be to allocate TWO out of EIGHT CPU cores for Acumatica Application Pool. CPU cores are counted from 0 to 7. So lets allocate Core 7 and Core 6 for Acumatica instance. Mask to cover this scenario should be 11000000 in a binary notation or 192 in decimal. All we have to do to stay on a legal ground and to get support from Acumatica and not to risk loose our license is:

Call up IIS Manager from the Main Panel

 Find what is the Application Pool Name for our Acumatica Web Site


Now we should change the Mask settings for that Application Pool


After you choose Advanced Settings for the pool, please modify these settings according to our mask choice



Scenario 2. Your IIS server has 4 CPU cores, and you have purchased the license from Acumatica for M size, which is 4 CPU cores.

No configuration is necessary on the server as number of CPU cores purchased and available on the server matches.

Please note Scenario 2 is the easiest for the End User to provide assurance that there is no license violations or misuse.

All the best,

Sergey.