QuickBooks Enterprise 9 and Virtual Servers

The QuickBooks Enterprise web site "tech specs" section doesn't offer us any insight on the use of Enterprise in a virtual server environment. This is similar to the situation mentioned in my previous post about QuickBooks Enterprise 9 and 64 bit computers.

So I inquired about whether QuickBooks Enterprise 9 runs on virtual servers or not. Here is the response I received from Rich Walker, my contact at Intuit:

"While our Quality Assurance (QA) teams have not done extensive testing on virtual machines, all versions of QuickBooks will run on virtual machines, such as those running VMware. Basically, QuickBooks recognizes the appropriate Windows operating system running on the virtual machine, and then launches as usual."

In addition, I called the Enterprise support desk to hear what they had to say about their experiences - they indicated that they have customers that are successfully running QuickBooks in a virtual server environment, but this setup is not officially supported.

I'm not sure I'd put my mission-critical QuickBooks application into a non-supported virtual server environment just yet. I would expect to see some additional focus from Intuit around the virtual server technology in their upcoming QuickBooks Enterprise 10 release.

Are you using QuickBooks in a virtual server setup? Had good experiences or bad? Please post a comment below to let our readers know your thoughts.

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Comments

[route sales @ routestarsolutions.com]

Quickbooks offer a lot. I can't imagine myself doing a lot of my tasks without the help of quickbooks. It is the software for me, so far.

[john]

I've had problem with Quickbook 2007 in Virtual PC (XP), and QB 2010 in VirtualBox (Win7x32)...the installation in Virtualbox just one day quit launching and I've never been able to fix it. The installation in VirtualPC wouldn't launch at all, no matter what I did.

[Scott Gregory, QuickBooks Expert]

Eric:

You are correct - if you have a problem with Enterprise in your virtual environment, the QB support team isn't obligated to assist you to try and fix the problem. They may opt to try and help you, but they may simply defer and say "we don't support that setup and can't help you with it".

My readers will be curious to learn more about your experience with this new setup.

Scott Gregory

[Eric Mata]

I am going to be installing QB Enterprise 10 on a Windows Server 2008 virtual server (running within SBS 2008). When you say that this is not officially supported does that mean that QB will not offer support if I have a problem in this environment? I have not found anything official on their site.

[Scott Gregory, QuickBooks Expert]

Thanks for the post and for sharing your "real world" experience with us! Glad to hear that it has been a very positive one for your business.

I believe that many others share your comment about the meaning of the term "enterprise".

Just curious - how many users do you have in QB Enterprise?

Scott Gregory

[QB User]

QuickBooks Enterprise 9 and Virtual Servers:

No problems at all! We've been running the Server under VMware Vi3 for months and routinely use the client inside of workstation 5.x and 6.x - easy for R&D testing roll-backs and makes sure all updates are distributed.

The enterprise designation - given the server service and scale is not in any class or meaning of the sense enterprise. QuickBooks needs to learn to use a real RBDMS.