I would like to start up a talk for those of use using hazus in a virtual environment. I work for a university and we teach emergency administration. We have lots of students online so i was asked to come up with a solutions for them to use hazus from home. We decided to go with VMWare ESXi on a dell server. It runs great but I did notice that you need a very hefty processing environment depending on how many users will be using hazus at any one time. Anyone who has used hazus knows that it really works out the processors when your processing your reaches or finding your streams. The ESXi has a load balancing for the processor so that no one person could take all the processing power. At first i did not set this option and the first person got all the processor power and the rest of our students were going along at 50 mhz. I will be making a more details report as well as some video of our set up. I welcome some comments and discussion on this and brain storm some ways to improve it. If you have any questions please post them here or email me.

My next endeavor will be hazus on Mac OS X

J, will you share your university information with us?

This week I will be visiting University of West Florida to learn first hand about the successes and challenges they experienced in providing HAZUS in a virtual environment. I learned about their innovative use of HAZUS in a virtual environment from a published success story on HAZUS.org.
I will post an update after the visit.

Rick Burgess

We tried it in a class we had a semester of so ago. We were using an VMWare ESXi dell poweredge with specs below.  I found that the program was such a resource hog that on our current machine only one or two would work. Now also I was running a large environment for one machine i think it was something like 30 machines at that time. Today i am running 39.

4 CPU x 1.861 GHz Intel Xeon
Two Nics
31.99 GB RAM

University of West Florida is interested in collaborating with other schools using GIS and HAZUS in a Web based environment.
Contact me directly if you are interested.

Rick Burgess
Region IV HAZUS Team
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

feel free to email me .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

I havent updated this in awhile so i thought i would post an update. We are running hazus mr4 in 30 or so virtual machines. We are currently experiencing some weird sql errors when trying to import regions. I am working on a fix and will post it once i know anything. On a physical machine this issue was solved installing sql express 2008 but this approach did not work on the virtual machine since the install failed.