Production Instances!

💬 General Discussion
1

Hello all,

I would love for this to become a sticky thread.

Please share what you can about your production instance of SuiteCRM.

What OS?
Versions of PHP MySQL/Maria etc…

What is your instance being used for?

I am running on a vultr VPS
8gb RAM
6CPU
150GB SSD
with a DB size of ~30GB

system built from minimal CentOS
[b]

  • CentOS Linux release 7.2.1511 (Core)
  • Apache/2.4.6 (CentOS)
  • 5.5.44-MariaDB
  • PHP 5.4.16

[/b]

2 Versions of SuiteCRM running 7.4

One heavily customized and actually comes from SugarCRM 6.5 Community and slowly upgraded over time to its current 7.4.
The data was migrated from a paid for CRM with limited functionality. I could tell it was built from VTIGER.

Another newer instance installed directly from SuiteCRM 7.4 and currently slowly being customized.

The companies I work for use the CRM to track clients, payments dates (custom module) and task that need to be completed for that client.
We track calls, emails, notes, documents for the clients etc.

We also have a newer company branching off doing similar work only now we are using the Accounts section along with contacts.

Our sales agents use the leads modules to enter data with many custom fields, I have altered the lead convert page to only convert to a contact with a custom form. And then we have someone verify that data because sales agents are always looking for shortcuts.

My original SuiteCRM form SugarCRM was first ran on a CentOS 6.5 box on a dedi over 2 years ago. It has been migrated maybe ~5 times. Overall very satisfied with its functionality. Any errors I get are typically my fault with configuration except for some glitches on previous version. Particularly with the introduction of the Responsive Theme.

If you have any specific question about my Production Environments feel free to ask. Please share your Production instances.

Also, if i figured we went with lets say SugarCRM Ultimate, at 150/user/month

At the begining we would of been at 5-10 users so that woudl of cost us already
$750-$1500/month

To our current usage of 30+ users would run us $4500 a month. that is whole salaries being saved and people being employed from that alone.
We also save tons of money operating our own open source asterisk call center software, saving at the least 30 per user per month. With typical paid for call center functionality though we would of been looking at 75 per user per month for phones alone.

So because of just phone and crm cost being open source. Currently I can say our company is saving
75(phones) +150(CRM) / user per month

225x 30+ users = 6,750/month

20,250 per quarter

81k a year!

Those are real numbers. Not to mention the license cost we save using libre office, samba4 etc. I use open source alot :slight_smile:

2 Likes
2

Also I have ran the same SuiteCRM from 2 years ago on CentOS6.5 CentOS 7 and OpenSuse 13.1

3

Stickied.

I’m sure this will be useful for other users looking at the benefits of SuiteCRM, open source software and specifications required to host etc.

Thanks,

Will.

4

SuiteCRM: Version 7.5.3
Sugar Version 6.5.23 (Build 1061)

Web server:
Hyper-v VM running Windows 2012 and IIS. The Host box is also WS2012.
PHP 5.6.0
wincache 1.3.6.3
Virtual RAM enabled, usage is usually between 1.5 and 4 gb with wincache enabled.

DB server:
IBM x-3650m4
Windows Server 2008r2
MSSQL 2008r2
Quad core Xeon
16 GB RAM

We already had licensing for Microsoft, and the virtual memory doesn’t work very well with a Linux guest under Hyper-V so we went the MS route.

We are using it mostly for IT project management and on our helpdesk for a large trucking company. We have 3 technicians and two project managers. Accounts are the different departments in the company that we support, and contacts are the end users. We are using AOP to assign new requests to technicians, and to keep the users updated when there is an update to their request. It’s really helped to automate a lot of the copy/paste we used to do with our old helpdesk ticketing system.

We tried pushing it to the sales team, but they’d rather pay for a brand name than try something new.

Performance is acceptable, my only gripe is that I can’t use studio with wincache turned on. I’m not modifying fields all that often, so I haven’t bothered to look for a fix.

5

Live 7.4.3
Dev 7.7.5

(Will soon upgrade live)

Running as very small VM’s on VMware using openSUSE everything is out of the box standard install

6

I don’t have a production set up yet, we’re still starting the project. But I’m happy with my architecture and I think it’s a bit original, so I’d like to share it here. It’s basically an extremely unexpensive set up for a non-profit with a tight budget. But I would use it on a commercial company any day.

I run Microsoft Hyper-V server as a virtualisation layer. This is the FREE server, without any GUI. It takes a bit getting used to but hey, it’s free. It has excellent hardware compatibility for cheaper hardware, unlike VMWare.

Inside that I run SuiteCRM over Ubuntu, latest version. Microsoft has been contributing directly to the kernel to improve Hyper-V compatibility, and it is now excellent (dynamic memory and all). Using SuiteCRM over Linux, it seems to me, gives less problems that over Windows.

I use Intel I7’s and SSD disks, but nothing too fancy. It’s not a large organization.

The main advantage of this set up is that I can get a virtualization feature that normally is reserved only for payed version, but on a free setup: that feature is replication. I can run a couple of Hyper-V servers and have them replicate the VM between them. Failover from one to the other is a breeze, really easy.

I also plan to do this for performance reasons: one server runs SuiteCRM database, the other runs SuiteCRM web server and app. Each replicates to the other. So in case of failure, I simply run both on the same server, with some performance penalty, of course, but the good thing is that I can make use of my replication hardware for performance on the good days, and for disaster recovery on the bad days.

Having replication (plus backups) is what enables me to drop the requirement for expensive hardware. I got this idea from Google, they realized that since they need to have several layers of disaster recovery they might as well use cheap hardware and just replace it as needed.

A replicated, virtualized, full-featured, performant CRM for around 1400 €.

7

I realise this is an old thread, are you stil using this Hyper-V setup today?

8

Hello

Yes I am. Except the part about splitting the web server in one server and the database in another, for performance. Since I didn’t have any performance challenges I opted for the simpler, one-server-for-everything version.

9

Thanks for the feedback. We’d chatted once before regarding upgrading SuiteCRM on Windows Server. Long term I’m looking at solutions for a mixed up environment to replicate across more than one site. I might have to maintain database on a Windows Server base due to shared apps and move SuiteCRM to Linux for upgrade/update compatibility, and then give each site local replication for local reporting to maintain responsiveness and overcome networking bottlenecks. So to test out configs I’ll probably get SuiteCRM running locally on a Hyper-V VM and MySQL on the main OS.

I realise I’d be better off to split the apps onto their own server base, but I do not get to make the spending call or have control over the other apps, and Hyper-V is free.

1 Like