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12 Days of ECHO, Seventh Day: My Admin Gave to Me, Tips on Epicor ERP 10 Server Disk Space!

12 Days of ECHO, Seventh Day: My Admin Gave to Me, Tips on Epicor ERP 10 Server Disk Space!

Epicor ERP 10 Server Disk Space – Where’d It Go?

 

Do you ever wonder where your server’s disk space goes?  Many times, you might not even notice until a server crashes with an ‘out of disk’ error message, or some application stops working.  Only then might you start digging around and find that a volume is out of disk space.  Proactive monitoring is essential, and if you sample free disk space once a day for a month, Excel will tell you when you’ll run out of disk space.  However, if you proactively monitor and cultivate your disk usage, your server will reach a general stasis and disk usage will remain relatively constant.

 

A disclaimer – if you never purge old data and keep every document, sales order and schematic from the beginning of time, you’ll keep buying more disk space.  However, disk storage is cheap, management of it is expensive!

 

If your Epicor Terminal Server runs lower than about 6GB free, Epicor.exe will start throwing errors.  You don’t even have to be THAT critically low before that will start impacting functionality and performance.  Disks that run low on space suffer fragmentation, and even on an SSD drive, the work of allocating new disk space on a mostly full volume hurts!

 

So what are the common culprits in an Epicor ecosystem?

  • IIS Logs (see our prior holiday report on IIS Log Sprawl)
  • SQL Transaction Logs (report coming soon)
  • Enabling Epicor server tracing in the Admin Console can be helpful, but the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\app\server will grow with those logs quickly!
  • The share called \\appserver\EpicorData stores many files; bad BAQ’s, BPM’s, and reports can leave large files here.
  • Server administrators often to download patches and new versions, extract them and forget to remove the downloads and extractions when done with the upgrade.

 

Here’s an example over a month of a SQL server transaction log volume.  Guess what day was a bad day?  And to boot, it was at midnight, when everyone was home, not watching the servers.

How can you manage this?  Use a tool like TreeSizeFree (from JAM Software) will quickly reveal the disk hogs, and the built-in windows tool forfiles.exe will make short work of removing the old files.

 

You can also use a management tool like EstesGroup Managed Services does and gain visibility into the critical component long before it becomes a problem in your business.

 

 

If you liked reading the “Seventh Day of ECHO” return to our main list to read all of the other “12 Days of ECHO” posts.

 

Do you have questions or need assistance with your Epicor system?  Please feel free to Contact Us and see if we can help get your bits and bytes in order.

12 Days of ECHO, Sixth Day: My Admin Gave to Me a Fix for Microsoft IIS Log Sprawl!

12 Days of ECHO, Sixth Day: My Admin Gave to Me a Fix for Microsoft IIS Log Sprawl!

Microsoft IIS Log Sprawl: Getting Away from the Sprawl

 

On the Sixth Day of ECHO, my admin gave to me, some tips about Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and log files!

 

Every Epicor E10 and Prophet 21 Middleware server uses Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) to get the job done.  And by default, IIS creates a log file on the C: drive for every day it’s running. Often we can see how long a server has been running by counting IIS log files. However, chances are great you don’t ever look at those log files! Therefore, we recommend disabling the IIS logs in IIS Manager to save the I/O and disk space. If you need the logs for auditing, we suggest putting them on another volume and marking them with NTFS compression for best performance.  After that, a weekly script to delete the oldest files will keep things neat and trim. FORFILES /P C:\inetpub\logs /s /*.LOG /D – 30 “cmd /c del @FILE” is my go-to command. 

 

If you liked reading the “Sixth Day of ECHO,” return to our main list to read all of the other “12 Days of ECHO” posts.

ECHO is EstesCloud Managed Hosting. What does that mean and what does it have to do with Microsoft IIS Log Sprawl? What doesn’t have to do with cloud-based data strategy these days? EstesCloud brings you all the security and reliability of cutting edge technology, and you don’t have to maintain it or worry if it’s compliant or it’s going to crash. We take on the worries, so you can focus on your business. (This might even allow you a little free time to look at your Microsoft IIS Log Sprawl if you like.)

 

Do you have questions or need assistance with your Epicor system?  Please feel free to contact us and see if we can help get your bits and bytes in order.

 

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Overcoming Industry Challenges with Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing ERP

Overcoming Industry Challenges with Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing ERP

The A&D industry is facing growth and dynamic change. In striving for quality and status, it is facing challenges in maintaining both. From the procurement of raw materials to the introduction of new technologies that will impact production (and everything in between), there are industry-specific challenges that manufacturers must face. Fortunately, there is ERP software that has been developed for use in the Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing industry that can help with those challenges.


AS9100 and ITAR Compliance (Dynamic Compliance):

The rigorous demands of the regulatory environment aren’t going to go away anytime soon. Your ERP software has regulatory features built-in throughout, providing you with enhanced traceability and audit management that not only assists you in achieving compliance but helps you prove that you’re compliant, as well.

Supply Chain Risk Management:

An A&D company’s supply chain is always at risk due to factors such as unexpected shifts in demand, last-minute design changes, and even political shifts that can make it difficult to procure the raw materials you need. Your manufacturing ERP can provide you with the visibility of your supply chain that you need to monitor, respond to, and manage supply changes throughout the production cycle.

Supply Chain Complexity Creep:

Introducing new technology into your production cycle can result in what’s known as supply chain complexity creep. This is a slowdown of your work processes as workers learn the new technology and master its integration into the supply chain. Your ERP for A&D manufacturing helps to alleviate complexity creep by providing you with the ability to monitor and analyze the data generated from every step of the process so you can make quick decisions based on real-time information.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM):

In an industry as complex as A&D manufacturing, you need the ability to manage all of the information required at every stage of the product’s lifecycle in order to manage your processes cost-effectively and within compliance. Your ERP system should provide powerful PLM capabilities to handle a massive range of processes and even the longest of product lifecycles.


The Aerospace & Defense sector has particularly complex processes that are marked by stringent regulations, rapid changes, and intricate engineering. Thankfully, EstesGroup has your need for a highly adaptable ERP system covered. For more information, contact us.

12 Days of ECHO, Fifth Day: My Admin Gave to Me Too Much RAM for My Epicor VM!

12 Days of ECHO, Fifth Day: My Admin Gave to Me Too Much RAM for My Epicor VM!

Too Much CPU & RAM for Epicor Application Server

 

Sometimes, more memory is not better.  Often, server admins will throw more resources (CPU and RAM) at a server to make it go faster.  Check our tidbit on SQL Licensing to see what that might hurt your licensing model, and in general, with SQL, the more RAM the merrier.  There is a decreasing return on investment however, and when it comes to your Epicor application server, we often see clients who over-commit resources and cause hypervisor performance issues.  Assuming you run in a virtualized world (as most of our clients do), over-committing CPU and RAM can cause the host machine to ‘thrash’ and actually run slower than if you had less resources.  For more details, search on NUMA boundaries and “memory ballooning”.  Check your Epicor application servers, if they have a lot of unused RAM and low CPU utilization, you might be a victim of over-committing resources. 

 

If you liked reading the “Fifth Day of ECHO” return to our main list to read all of the other “12 Days of ECHO” posts.

 

Do you have questions or need assistance with your Epicor system?  Please feel free to Contact Us and see if we can help get your bits and bytes in order.

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12 Days of ECHO, Fourth Day: My Admin Gave to Me Tips on SQL 64k Clusters!

12 Days of ECHO, Fourth Day: My Admin Gave to Me Tips on SQL 64k Clusters!

Tips on SQL 64K Clusters and Epicor SQL Services Database Bytes

 

Microsoft SQL likes to do all its input/output in 64k chunks, but Windows likes to format hard drives in 4K chunks called “clusters”. Studies have shown that formatting the volumes that store SQL databases and transaction logs benefit from 64k clusters – up to 35% better performance!  To check what your cluster size is, open an Elevated Command Prompt and type “CHKDSK D:” (where D: is where your databases are stored).  The line with xxx bytes in each allocation unit” should say 65536, and not 4096.   

 

If you find your server admin formatted with the default 4096 allocation unit, then changing is easy – just kick everyone out of Epicor, shutdown the SQL services and backup the entire volume.  Then, reformat with 64k clusters and do a volume restore.  Restart SQL services (and your Epicor Task Agent) and let the users back in! 

 

Sound like too much for you to handle? 

Give us a call or send us a message, and our Database Admins’s would be happy to assist. 

 

If you like this tip and trick post, please read our other 12 Days of ECHO.

About the Author

Daryl Sirota has served for 35+ years in IT, both as a sole proprietor and as a senior team at System Source, and now as VP of Managed Services at EstesGroup. He loves to travel and currently resides near EstesGroup headquarters in Loveland, Colorado.

Daryl Sirota – VP, Technical Services