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Hi Developers, We are happy to announce the new InterSystems online programming contest dedicated to creating useful tools to make your fellow developers' lives easier: 🏆 InterSystems Developer Tools Contest 🏆 Duration: July 14 - August 3, 2025 Prize pool: $12,000 The topic Develop any applications that improve developer experience with IRIS, help to develop faster, contribute more qualitative code, help to test, deploy, support, or monitor your solution with InterSystems IRIS. General Requirements: An application or library must be fully functional. It should not be an import or a direct interface for an already existing library in another language (except for C++, there you really need to do a lot of work to create an interface for IRIS). It should not be a copy-paste of an existing application or library. Accepted applications: new to Open Exchange apps or existing ones, but with a significant improvement. Our team will review all applications before approving them for the contest. The application should work either on IRIS Community Edition or IRIS for Health Community Edition. Both could be downloaded as host (Mac, Windows) versions from Evaluation site, or can be used in a form of containers pulled from InterSystems Container Registry or Community Containers: intersystemsdc/iris-community:latest or intersystemsdc/irishealth-community:latest . The application should be Open Source and published on GitHub or GitLab. The README file to the application should be in English, contain the installation steps, and contain either the video demo or/and a description of how the application works. Only 3 submissions from one developer are allowed. NB. Our experts will have the final say in whether the application is approved for the contest or not based on the criteria of complexity and usefulness. Their decision is final and not subject to appeal. Prizes 1. Experts Nomination - a specially selected jury will determine winners: 🥇 1st place - $5,000 🥈 2nd place - $2,500 🥉 3rd place - $1,000 🏅 4th place - $500 🏅 5th place - $300 🌟 6-10th places - $100 2. Community winners - applications that will receive the most votes in total: 🥇 1st place - $1,000 🥈 2nd place - $600 🥉 3rd place - $300 🏅 4th place - $200 🏅 5th place - $100 ❗ If several participants score the same number of votes, they are all considered winners, and the prize money is shared among the winners.❗ Cash prizes are awarded only to those who can verify their identity. If there are any doubts, organizers will reach out and request additional information about the participant(s). Who can participate? Any Developer Community member, except for InterSystems employees (ISC contractors allowed). Create an account! Developers can team up to create a collaborative application. 2 to 5 developers are allowed in one team. Do not forget to highlight your team members in the README of your application – DC user profiles. Important Deadlines: 🛠 Application development and registration phase: July 14, 2025 (00:00 EST): Contest begins. July 27, 2025 (23:59 EST): Deadline for submissions. ✅ Voting period: July 28, 2025 (00:00 EST): Voting begins. August 3, 2025 (23:59 EST): Voting ends. Note: Developers can improve their apps throughout the entire registration and voting period. Helpful Resources: ✓ Example applications: webterminal - an emulation for IRIS terminal as a web application git-source-control - git tool to manage changes for shared dev environments and IRIS UI dev editors by @Timothy Leavitt iris-rad-studio - RAD for UI cmPurgeBackup - backup tool errors-global-analytics - errors visualization objectscript-openapi-definition - open API generator Test Coverage Tool - test coverage helper iris-bi-utils - a toolset for IRIS BI and many more. ✓ Templates we suggest to start from: iris-dev-template Interoperability-python rest-api-contest-template native-api-contest-template iris-fhir-template iris-fullstack-template iris-interoperability-template iris-analytics-template ✓ For beginners with IRIS: Build a Server-Side Application with InterSystems IRIS Learning Path for beginners ✓ For beginners with ObjectScript Package Manager (IPM): How to Build, Test and Publish IPM Package with REST Application for InterSystems IRIS Package First Development Approach with InterSystems IRIS and IPM ✓ How to submit your app to the contest: How to publish an application on Open Exchange How to submit an application for the contest Need Help? Join the contest channel on InterSystems' Discord server or talk with us in the comment to this post. We're waiting for YOUR project – join our coding marathon to win! By participating in this contest, you agree to the competition terms laid out here. Please read them carefully before proceeding.

Hello Community, We're thrilled to invite all our Developer Community members (both InterSystems employees and not) to participate in our next contest! 💡 The 4th InterSystems Ideas Contest 💡 We're looking for your innovative ideas to enhance InterSystems IRIS and related products and services. We encourage suggestions based on real-life use cases, highlighting the tangible benefits your idea will bring to other users and how it will enhance developers' experiences with InterSystems technology. 📅 Duration: June 9 - July 20, 2025 🏆 Prizes for the best ideas and a random draw! 🎁 Gifts for everyone: A special gift will be given to each author whose idea is accepted in the contest. >> SUBMIT AN IDEA << Accepted ideas should: be created during the Ideas Contest period by a user registered on the InterSystems Ideas portal (you can log in via InterSystems SSO); not be part of other already existing ideas - only new ideas are allowed; not describe the existing functionality of InterSystems IRIS and related Products or Services; be posted in English; be written by a person, not generated by AI; be accepted as meaningful by InterSystems experts; ❗adhere to the structure below: 1️⃣ Description of the idea 2️⃣ Who is the target audience? 3️⃣ What problem does it solve? 4️⃣ How does this impact the efficiency, stability, reliability, etc, of the product? 5️⃣ Provide a specific use case or scenario that illustrates how this idea could be used in practice. All ideas are subject to moderation. We may request to clarify the submitted idea. Ideas that meet the requirements will receive a special "Ideas Contest" status. Who can participate? We invite EVERYONE to join our new Ideas Contest. Both InterSystems employees and non-employees are welcome to participate and submit their ideas. Prizes 1. Participation gift - authors of all accepted ideas will get: 🎁 Aluminum Media Stand 2. Expert award - InterSystems experts will select the best ideas. Winners will get: 🥇 1st place - Stilosa Barista Espresso Machine & Cappuccino Maker 🥈 2nd place - Osmo Mobile 7 🥉 3rd place - Smart Mini Projector XGODY Gimbal 3 3. Random award - a participating idea author chosen at random will get: 🏅 Smart Mini Projector XGODY Gimbal 3 Note: InterSystems employees are eligible to receive only the participation gift. Expert and Random awards can only be won by Developer Community members who are not InterSystems employees. Important dates: ⚠️ Idea Submission: June 9 - July 13 ✅ Voting for ideas: July 14 - July 20 🎉 Winners announcement: July 21 Good luck! 🍀 Note: All prizes are subject to availability and shipping options. Some items may not be available for international shipping to specific countries, in this case, an equivalent alternative will be provided. We will let you know if a prize is not available and offer a possible replacement. Prizes cannot be delivered to residents of Crimea, Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or other US-embargoed countries. Can inters join and do we count as employees who can get the participation gift? 😊 Interns are absolutely welcome to join — we’d love to have you involved! 😊 And they are considered employees for this contest. While the Expert and Random awards are reserved for non-employees, taking part is still a great opportunity. As an intern, you have a unique, hands-on perspective that can contribute to a deeper understanding of what the product truly needs. Thanks for clarification. I'll be thinking of ideas! As I'm diving into Angular right now, mine is to add a projection to a TypeScript interface. Is there a specific tag we're supposed to use for the contest this year? Hey Developers! The fantastic prizes for the 4th InterSystems Ideas Contest were chosen, and here they are: Expert Award 🏆 InterSystems experts will select the best ideas, with amazing prizes awaiting the winners: 🥇 1st place: Stilosa Barista Espresso Machine & Cappuccino Maker 🥈 2nd place: Osmo Mobile 7 🥉 3rd place: Smart Mini Projector XGODY Gimbal 3 Random Award One lucky idea chosen at random will win: 🏅 Smart Mini Projector XGODY Gimbal 3 Reminder: To qualify for the contest, ensure your idea submission follows this required structure: 1. Description of the idea2. Who is the target audience?3. What problem does it solve?4. How does this impact the efficiency, stability, reliability, etc., of the product?5. Provide a specific use case or scenario that illustrates how this idea could be used in practice. Good luck, everyone! 🚀✨ There is no need to choose a specific tag. All ideas that pass our experts' master will be added to the Contest. Hi Community! We have an update on the dates of the contest - it's extended until July 20. During InterSystems Ready 2025, we received numerous requests to do this, as many of you were focused on your presentations or other commitments related to the event and didn't have the opportunity to submit your ideas. You asked, we listened! Don't forget, for the idea to take part in the contest, it has to follow the structure: Description of the idea Who is the target audience? What problem does it solve? How does this impact the efficiency, stability, reliability, etc, of the product? Provide a specific use case or scenario that illustrates how this idea could be used in practice. At this point, we have a lot of interesting ideas, but they don't adhere to the terms, so they aren't considered for the contest. @Mark.OReilly, @Andre.LarsenBarbosa, @Abdul.Manan, @Marykutty.George1462, @Jeffrey.Drumm, @Robert.Barbiaux, @Sylvain.Guilbaud, @Ashok.Kumar. Hey Community! During the contest period, 43 ideas were submitted to the Ideas Portal, thank you for your contributions! 🙌Out of those, 24 ideas have been accepted into the Contest so far. If your idea wasn't accepted yet (one of the remaining 19), there's still time! To be included in the Contest, please make sure your idea follows this required structure: 1️⃣ Description of the idea2️⃣ Who is the target audience?3️⃣ What problem does it solve?4️⃣ How does this improve the efficiency, stability, reliability, etc., of the product?5️⃣ Provide a specific use case or scenario that shows how your idea could be used in practice 🕒 You have until the end of day Sunday to update your submissions. Don’t miss your chance to participate! Good luck! 🍀 Hey Community! The submission period is over, and now it's voting time! While the judges are hard at work, let's look at the ideas that are participating in the contest: Author Idea @Yuri.Gomes Extending an open source LLM to support efficient code generation in intersystems technology @David.Hockenbroch Add Typescript Interface Projection @Enrico.Parisi Make DICOM iteroperability adapter usable in Mirror configuration/environment @Marykutty.George1462 Ability to abort a specific message from message viewer or visual trace page @Enrico.Parisi Do not include table statistics when exporting Production for deployment @Ashok.Kumar recursive search in Abstract Set Query @Ashok.Kumar TTL(Time To Live) Parameter in %Persistent Class @Ashok.Kumar Programmatic Conversion from SDA to HL7 v2 @Ashok.Kumar Streaming JSON Parsing Support @Ashok.Kumar Differentiating System-Defined vs. User-Defined Web Applications in IRIS @Ashok.Kumar Need for Application-Specific HTTP Tracing in Web Gateway @Ashok.Kumar Add Validation for Dispatch Class in Web Application Settings @Ashok.Kumar Encoding in SQL functions @Ashok.Kumar Compression in SQL Functions @Alexey.Maslov Universal Global Exchange Utility @Ashok.Kumar Automatically Expose Interactive API Documentation @Vishal.Pallerla Dark Mode for Management Portal @Ashok.Kumar IRIS Native JSON Schema Validator @Ashok.Kumar Enable Schema Validation for REST APIs Using Swagger Definitions @diba Auto-Scaling for Embedded Python Workloads in IRIS @Dmitry.Maslennikov Integrate InterSystems IRIS with SQLancer for Automated SQL Testing and Validation @Dmitry.Maslennikov Bring IRIS to the JavaScript ORM World @Ashok.Kumar HTML Report for UnitTest Results @Andre.LarsenBarbosa AI Suggestions for Deprecated Items @Mark.OReilly Add a field onto Oauth Client to allow alerting expiry dates alert @Mark.OReilly Expose "Reply To" as default on EnsLib.EMail.AlertOperation I have updated the structure on my 2 ideas, wasn't aware of the contest, was just creating ideas ah it's closed now, no matter, hopefully in clearer format anyway now for actioning Since it's the beginning of the voting period, it was decided to add your ideas to the contest. Good luck!

Hi Community! We’re pleased to announce that several Early Access Programs (EAPs) are now open for registration. These programs provide developers with the opportunity to explore upcoming features and technologies from InterSystems before their general release. By joining an EAP, you can: Evaluate and test new functionality Provide direct feedback to product teams Help shape the future direction of InterSystems platforms If you're interested in contributing to the evolution of our tools and getting early insight into what's coming next, we encourage you to review the following available programs and sign up: Name Description FHIR Application Training Course InterSystems is developing a comprehensive FHIR application development course. The course will consist of 40 hours of recorded video content, numerous GitHub repositories, interactive quizzes, and supplementary material. The course will be targeted at FHIR application developers and will use the InterSystems IRIS for Health Community Edition with application development in Python. Health Connect - AI Copilot for DTL Explanations Uses generative AI to provide human-readable summaries for Data Transformation Language (DTL) logic. This reduces onboarding time for new interface developers, accelerates troubleshooting, and makes it easier for non-experts to understand and maintain complex data transformations. Health Connect - DTL Assistant Copilot for HL7 Transformations Introduces AI-powered mapping assistance that suggests transformations, auto-generates mappings, and helps enforce standards between HL7 message formats. This assistant shortens development cycles, reduces errors, and increases team productivity by lowering the technical barrier to working with HL7. Health Connect - CDA Validation Enables robust validation of Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) files against standards and rules, improving data integrity and compliance.This tool helps organizations detect structural and content-related issues early, ensuring smoother data exchange and regulatory readiness. Health Data De-Identifier Health Data De-identifier is a configurable framework to de-identify structured clinical data. It incorporates HIPAA Safe Harbor rules for the US but provides hooks to be adjusted for regional requirements. InterSystems Data Fabric Studio Virtual Assistant module InterSystems Data Fabric Studio (IDFS) simplifies data management and exploration. With its Virtual Assistant module, users gain access to interactive assistants that help them understand, navigate, and leverage their data more effectively. Built on an agentic framework, IDFS supports reasoning, diagnostics, evaluation, and governance capabilities. Users can also design custom assistants and agents that are enriched with specialized knowledge and memory for context-aware interaction. InterSystems Data Fabric Studio with Health Module Provides a fully managed, self-service platform for provisioning trusted healthcare datasets, data models for analytics, AI models, and operational reporting. It includes out-of-the-box business connectors, pipeline building, and data catalog modeling capabilities. InterSystems IRIS Security Database This new feature provides greater security by moving sensitive data from IRISSYS to a new database: IRISSECURITY. An additional security role has been added to restrict access to this data. OAuth2 Authentication/Authorization InterSystems is making it easier for customers to use and configure OAuth2. Online Backup With Online Backup, InterSystems IRIS automatically tracks which blocks change, such that it can easily create incremental backups of your data without freezing or otherwise interrupting regular operations. In InterSystems IRIS 2024.1, the first part of a significant overhaul of this capability is now available for your evaluation, bringing orders-of-magnitude faster backup and restore operations compared to the original version. If you are using or considering Online Backup today, please join the Early Access Program to receive updates and share your feedback. Table Partitioning Table Partitioning helps users manage large tables efficiently by enabling them to split the data across multiple databases based on a logical scheme. This enables, for example, moving older data to a database mounted on a cheaper tier of storage, while keeping the current data that is accessed frequently on premium storage. The data structure for partitioned tables also brings several operational and performance benefits when tables get very large (> 1B rows). Participation may be limited, so we recommend registering early if you're interested. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask them in the comments or send an email to EarlyAccess@InterSystems.com. >> REQUEST EARLY ACCESS HERE <<

Hi everybody, A customer would like to connect an IRIS database to Metabase BI. But Metabase does not have a connector that supports the IRIS database. Metabase only supports these databases: - Amazon Athena- BigQuery (Google Cloud Platform)- Druid- MongoDB (recommend version 4.2 or higher)- MySQL (recommend version 8.0.33 or higher, as well as MariaDB version 10.4 or higher)- Oracle- PostgreSQL- Presto- Redshift (Amazon Web Services)- Snowflake- SparkSQL- SQL Server- SQLite- Vertica And a few others. However, it is possible to create a driver for Metabase that connect to IRIS. Metabase comes with documentation on how to create a custom driver. Has anyone yet developed, or know of development of the driver for Metabase to IRIS connection? Thanks in advance. Alex Bravo Hi Alex, Not sure if you are still finding this. Hope it would be helpful for you.https://community.intersystems.com/post/metabase-iris-driver

Hi, Community! Are you building applications in a healthcare setting? See how InterSystems FHIR Server can help: What Is InterSystems FHIR Server? InterSystems Product Manager @Elijah.Cotterrell explains how InterSystems FHIR Server helps you store, manage, and query healthcare data. In a brief demo, Elijah shows how you can: Deploy a FHIR server. Configure OAuth authentication. You will also learn about two key tools—the Bulk FHIR Coordinator and FHIR SQL Builder—which allow you to scale your applications and perform analytics!

IRIS Community Edition Installation Process. Hello there developers, As a new amateur to the Developer Community, I had a few hurdles that I had to cross in order to find a way and install the IRIS for Community Edition. The Developer Community has been very helpful in guiding me thought this process, and which has made me write this post today. I believe that this will be helpful for any armature on the Developer Community trying to get hands on experience with IRIS. Steps to be followed. Step 1 Become a member of the Developer Community. For this you either need to be invited to the Developer Community by a friend of yours or you need to be referred to it via the Global Masters which also needs to be done by a friend. OR You can log on to the following link and become a member of the Developer community. https://login.intersystems.com/login/SSO.UI.Register.cls?referrer=https%3A//community.intersystems.com/ Image attached below. Step 2 Once you are a registered member of the DC you need to download IRIS of your choice or you could also use IRIS online. The link for both will be given below. Link to Download IRIS: https://download.intersystems.com Link to try IRIS online: https://www.intersystems.com/try-intersystems-iris-for-free If you are to download the IRIS then you got to choose from either one of these 2 of your choice. NOTE: You are eligible to do this only if you are a registered use. Shows the registered users name. InterSystems IRIS for Health Community Edition. InterSystems IRIS Community Edition There on all you must do is read and provide appropriate details and appropriate storage location for the application to be downloaded and installed. Step 3 User License Agreement Acceptance. Step 4 Appropriate naming Choosing the appropriate Uni code. For any new application you'll want to select Unicode. 8-bit would be used for legacy applications that were designed for 8-bit character sets. Step 5 Step 6 By choosing Development you will get the full package installed that is needed for your use. Step 7 Choose appropriate Security Levels depending on the scale of what you are to do. Step 8 If you are an InterSystems Employee and do not want to get your system clashed better use default System account. Step 9 Give it a strong password to secure it. Step 10 Now you will be required to enter another password for the CSPSystem. During the installation process a stripped-down version of the apache web server will be installed too (to serve the management portal and for test purposes). This is the CSP-System (CSP means CacheServerPages). Enter a password, you will need it rarely or almost never. Step 11 Carry on with the Installation Step 12 Complete Installation and Enjoy IRIS development Hi @Azezur Rahman, This is a very beautiful article. Will you be able to make one like this as a video representation, and also to take us through the interfaces so that we will have a better idea please? Hoping to hear soon from you. #Regards. Hi @Azezur Rahman, This is a great and helpful article. I was about to post and ask out from the community on how to use IRIS with community license. Your article is very informative and educational. Thank you so much for this. Hope that you would bring up more good content as this. Cheers. Yes i agree with @Fathima Zainab idea. Could you please make a video presentation, that will be more informative. Just a suggestion. Cheers These screenshots are useful! tx! Just updating the download link, nowadays this is: https://evaluation.intersystems.com/ (see also this post) And the download page for the Community Edition could look like this - thank you @Tani.Frankel! We have made sure that download.InterSystems.com redirects to evaluation.InterSystems.com so hopefully those trying to follow this article can still find it even though the workflow will look differently. @Azezur.Rahman2494 - would you be willing to update your Article since the Download app has been replaced by the Evaluation application? Thanks @Benjamin.Spead, note the link @Azezur.Rahman2494 provided above - https://download.intersystems.com/download/login.cspDoes not work (and is not redirected). Though as you mentioned the more basic - https://download.intersystems.com/ would redirect to the newer Evaluation page.It would be great if, as you suggested, the original article could be updated. I've updated the link in the article on behalf of being a moderator Thank you! @Azezur.Rahman2494 - it would be great if at some point you are willing to update the screen shots :)

Are you curious about how to run Python scripts directly in your InterSystems IRIS or Caché terminal? 🤔 Good news it's easy! 😆 IRIS supports Embedded Python, allowing you to use Python interactively within its terminal environment. How to access the Python Shell? To launch the Python shell from the IRIS terminal, simply run the following command: do ##class(%SYS.Python).Shell() This opens an interactive Python shell inside the IRIS terminal. From here, you can write and run Python code just as you would in a normal Python environment. Exiting the Shell: >>> quit() This will exit the Python shell and return you to the ObjectScript prompt. USER>do ##class(%SYS.Python).Shell() Python 3.9.5 (default, May 31 2022, 12:35:47) [MSC v.1927 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32 Type quit() or Ctrl-D to exit this shell. >>> name = 'Vachan' >>> age = 25 >>> print('Name: ',name,'\nAge:',age) Name: Vachan Age: 25 >>> quit() This is a great way to leverage Python's capabilities within your InterSystems environment. Whether you're experimenting, testing logic, or integrating with ObjectScript, the embedded Python shell makes it fast and flexible. Enjoy Coding! 👨‍💻 You can use :py alias to connect the python shell in IRIS terminal as well. Thanks! It's a cool article 😄 I'm gonna try it. Thanks! that worked! If you use the InterSystems CLI vis your OS shell, you can also simply run: #iris python instancename See the iris command docs (at least for some OSs).

Hi Community! Enjoy watching the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube: ⏯ Introduction to InterSystems Reports InterSystems Reports, powered by Logi Analytics, is a report generation tool that enables you to rapidly create and view visual reports of your data. This video introduces you to InterSystems Reports and its core components. ➡️ Subscribe to InterSystems Developers YouTube. Enjoy and stay tuned!

This post provides guidelines for configuration, system sizing and capacity planning when deploying Caché 2015 and later on a VMware ESXi 5.5 and later environment. I jump right in with recommendations assuming you already have an understanding of VMware vSphere virtualization platform. The recommendations in this guide are not specific to any particular hardware or site specific implementation, and are not intended as a fully comprehensive guide to planning and configuring a vSphere deployment -- rather this is a check list of best practice configuration choices you can make. I expect that the recommendations will be evaluated for a specific site by your expert VMware implementation team. [A list of other posts in the InterSystems Data Platforms and performance series is here.](https://community.intersystems.com/post/capacity-planning-and-performance-series-index) _Note:_ This post was updated on 3 Jan 2017 to highlight that VM memory reservations must be set for production database instances to guarantee memory is available for Caché and there will be no swapping or ballooning which will negatively impact database performance. See the section below *Memory* for more details. ### References The information here is based on experience and reviewing publicly available VMware knowledge base articles and VMware documents for example [Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere](https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/performance/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-67-performance-best-practices.pdf) and mapping to requirements of Caché database deployments. ## Are InterSystems' products supported on ESXi? It is InterSystems policy and procedure to verify and release InterSystems’ products against processor types and operating systems including when operating systems are virtualised. For specifics see [InterSystems support policy](http://www.intersystems.com/services-support/product-support/virtualization/) and [Release Information](http://www.intersystems.com/services-support/product-support/latest-platform/). >For example: Caché 2016.1 running on Red Hat 7.2 operating system on ESXi on x86 hosts is supported. Note: If you do not write your own applications you must also check your application vendors support policy. ### Supported Hardware VMware virtualization works well for Caché when used with current server and storage components. Caché using VMware virtualization has been deployed succesfully at customer sites and has been proven in benchmarks for performance and scalability. There is no significant performance impact using VMware virtualization on properly configured storage, network and servers with later model Intel Xeon processors, specifically: Intel Xeon 5500, 5600, 7500, E7-series and E5-series (including the latest E5 v4). Generally Caché and applications are installed and configured on the guest operating system in the same way as for the same operating system on bare-metal installations. It is the customers responsibility to check the [VMware compatibility guide](http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php) for the specific servers and storage being used. # Virtualised architecture I see VMware commonly used in two standard configurations with Caché applications: - Where primary production database operating system instances are on a ‘bare-metal’ cluster, and VMware is only used for additional production and non-production instances such as web servers, printing, test, training and so on. - Where ALL operating system instances, including primary production instances are virtualized. This post can be used as a guide for either scenario, however the focus is on the second scenario where all operating system instances including production are virtualised. The following diagram shows a typical physical server set up for that configuration. _Figure 1. Simple virtualised Caché architecture_ Figure 1 shows a common deployment with a minimum of three physical host servers to provide N+1 capacity and availability with host servers in a VMware HA cluster. Additional physical servers may be added to the cluster to scale resources. Additional physical servers may also be required for backup/restore media management and disaster recovery. For recommendations specific to _VMware vSAN_, VMware's Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution, see the following post: [Part 8 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning](https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-data-platforms-and-performance-%E2%80%93-part-8-hyper-converged-infrastructure-capacity). Most of the recommendations in this post can be applied to vSAN -- with the exception of some of the obvious differences in the Storage section below. # VMWare versions The following table shows key recommendations for Caché 2015 and later: vSphere is a suite of products including vCenter Server that allows centralised system management of hosts and virtual machines via the vSphere client. >This post assumes that vSphere will be used, not the "free" ESXi Hypervisor only version. VMware has several licensing models; ultimately choice of version is based on what best suits your current and future infrastructure planning. I generally recommend the "Enterprise" edition for its added features such as Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) for more efficient hardware utilization and Storage APIs for storage array integration (snapshot backups). The VMware web site shows edition comparisons. There are also Advanced Kits that allow bundling of vCenter Server and CPU licenses for vSphere. Kits have limitations for upgrades so are usually only recommended for smaller sites that do not expect growth. # ESXi Host BIOS settings The ESXi host is the physical server. Before configuring BIOS you should: - Check with the hardware vendor that the server is running the latest BIOS - Check whether there are any server/CPU model specific BIOS settings for VMware. Default settings for server BIOS may not be optimal for VMware. The following settings can be used to optimize the physical host servers to get best performance. Not all settings in the following table are available on all vendors’ servers. # Memory The following key rules should be considered for memory allocation: When running multiple Caché instances or other applications on a single physical host VMware has several technologies for efficient memory management such as transparent page sharing (TPS), ballooning, swap, and memory compression. For example when multiple OS instances are running on the same host TPS allows overcommitment of memory without performance degradation by eliminating redundant copies of pages in memory, which allows virtual machines to run with less memory than on a physical machine. >Note: VMware Tools must be installed in the operating system to take advantage of these and many other features of VMware. Although these features exist to allow for overcommitting memory, the recommendation is to always start by sizing vRAM of all VMs to fit within the physical memory available. Especially important in production environments is to carefully consider the impact of overcommitting memory and overcommit only after collecting data to determine the amount of overcommitment possible. To determine the effectiveness of memory sharing and the degree of acceptable overcommitment for a given Caché instance, run the workload and use Vmware commands `resxtop` or `esxtop` to observe the actual savings. A good reference is to go back and look at the [fourth post in this series on memory](https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-data-platforms-and-performance-part-4-looking-memory) when planning your Caché instance memory requirements. Especially the section "VMware Virtualisation considerations" where I point out: >Set VMware memory reservation on production systems. You want to *must* avoid any swapping for shared memory so set your production database VMs memory reservation to at least the size of Caché shared memory plus memory for Caché processes and operating system and kernel services. If in doubt **Reserve the full production database VMs memory (100% reservation)** to guarantee memory is available for your Caché instance so there will be no swapping or ballooning which will negatively impact database performance. Notes: Large memory reservations will impact vMotion operations so it is important to take this into consideration when designing the vMotion/management network. A virtual machine can only be live migrated, or started on another host with Vmware HA if the target host has free physical memory greater than or equal to the size of the reservation. This is especially important for production Caché VMs. For example pay particular attention to HA Admission Control policies. >Ensure capacity planning allows for distribution of VMs in event of HA failover. For non-production environments (test, train, etc) more aggressive memory overcommitment is possible, however do not over commit Caché shared memory, instead limit shared memory in the Caché instance by having less global buffers.  Current Intel processor architecture has a NUMA topology. Processors have their own local memory and can access memory on other processors in the same host. Not surprisingly accessing local memory has lower latency than remote. For a discussion of CPU check out the [third post in this series](https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-data-platforms-and-performance-%E2%80%93-part-3-focus-cpu) including a discussion about NUMA in the _comments section_. As noted in the BIOS section above a strategy for optimal performance is to ideally size VMs only up to maximum of number of cores and memory on a single processor. For example if your capacity planning shows your biggest production Caché database VM will be 14 vCPUs and 112 GB memory then consider whether a a cluster of servers with 2x E5-2680 v4 (14-core processor) and 256 GB memory is a good fit. >**Ideally** size VMs to keep memory local to a NUMA node. But dont get too hung up on this. If you need a "Monster VM" bigger than a NUMA node that is OK, VMware will manage NUMA for optimal performance. It also important to right-size your VMs and not allocate more resources than are needed (see below). ## CPU The following key rules should be considered for virtual CPU allocation: Production Caché systems should be sized based on benchmarks and measurements at live customer sites. For production systems use a strategy of initially sizing the system the same as bare-metal CPU cores and as per best practice monitoring to see if virtual CPUS (vCPUs) can be reduced. ### Hyperthreading and capacity planning A good starting point for sizing __production database__ VMs based on your rules for physical servers is to calculate physical server CPU requirements for the target processor with hyper-threading enabled then simply make the transaltaion: >One physical CPU (includes hyperthreading) = One vCPU (includes hyperthreading). A common misconception is that hyper-threading somehow doubles vCPU capacity. This is NOT true for physical servers or for logical vCPUs. Hyperthreading on a bare-metal server may give a 30% uplift in performance over the same server without hyperthreading, but this can also be variable depending on the application. For initial sizing assume is that the vCPU has full core dedication. For example; if you have a 32-core (2x 16-core) E5-2683 V4 server – size for a total of up to 32 vCPU capacity knowing there may be available headroom. This configuration assumes hyper-threading is enabled at the host level. VMware will manage the scheduling between all the applications and VMs on the host. Once you have spent time monitoring the appliaction, operating system and VMware performance during peak processing times you can decide if higher consolidation is possible. ### Licencing In vSphere you can configure a VM with a certain number of sockets or cores. For example, if you have a dual-processor VM (2 vCPUs), it can be configured as two CPU sockets, or as a single socket with two CPU cores. From an execution standpoint it does not make much of a difference because the hypervisor will ultimately decide whether the VM executes on one or two physical sockets. However, specifying that the dual-CPU VM really has two cores instead of two sockets could make a difference for software licenses. Note: Caché license counts the cores (not threads). # Storage >This section applies to the more traditional storage model using a shared storage array. For _vSAN_ recommendations also see the following post: [Part 8 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning](https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-data-platforms-and-performance-%E2%80%93-part-8-hyper-converged-infrastructure-capacity) The following key rules should be considered for storage: ## Size storage for performance Bottlenecks in storage is one of the most common problems affecting Caché system performance, the same is true for VMware vSphere configurations. The most common problem is sizing storage simply for GB capacity, rather than allocating a high enough number of spindles to support expected IOPS. Storage problems can be even more severe in VMware because more hosts can be accessing the same storage over the same physical connections. ## VMware Storage overview VMware storage virtualization can be categorized into three layers, for example: - The storage array is the bottom layer, consisting of physical disks presented as logical disks (storage array volumes or LUNs) to the layer above. - The next layer is the virtual environment occupied by vSphere. Storage array LUNs are presented to ESXi hosts as datastores and are formatted as VMFS volumes. - Virtual machines are made up of files in the datastore and include virtual disks are presented to the guest operating system as disks that can be partitioned and used in file systems. VMware offers two choices for managing disk access in a virtual machine—VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) and raw device mapping (RDM), both offer similar performance. For simple management VMware generally recommends VMFS, but there may be situations where RDMs are required. As a general recommendation – unless there is a particular reason to use RDM choose VMFS, _new development by VMware is directed to VMFS and not RDM._ ###Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) VMFS is a file system developed by VMware that is dedicated and optimized for clustered virtual environments (allows read/write access from several hosts) and the storage of large files. The structure of VMFS makes it possible to store VM files in a single folder, simplifying VM administration. VMFS also enables VMware infrastructure services such as vMotion, DRS and VMware HA. Operating Systems, applications, and data are stored in virtual disk files (.vmdk files). vmdk files are stored in the Datastore. A single VM can be made up of multiple vmdk files spread over several datastores. As the production VM in the diagram below shows a VM can include storage spread over several data stores. For production systems best performance is achieved with one vmdk file per LUN, for non-production systems (test, training etc) multiple VMs vmdk files can share a datastore and a LUN. While vSphere 5.5 has a maximum VMFS volume size of 64TB and VMDK size of 62TB when deploying Caché typically multiple VMFS volumes mapped to LUNs on separate disk groups are used to separate IO patterns and improve performance. For example random or sequential IO disk groups or to separate production IO from IO from other environments. The following diagram shows an overview of an example VMware VMFS storage used with Caché: _Figure 2. Example Caché storage on VMFS_ ### RDM RDM allows management and access of raw SCSI disks or LUNs as VMFS files. An RDM is a special file on a VMFS volume that acts as a proxy for a raw device. VMFS is recommended for most virtual disk storage, but raw disks might be desirable in some cases. RDM is only available for Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage. ### VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) For the best storage performance, customers should consider using VAAI-capable storage hardware. VAAI can improve the performance in several areas including virtual machine provisioning and of thin-provisioned virtual disks. VAAI may be available as a firmware update from the array vendor for older arrays. ### Virtual Disk Types ESXi supports multiple virtual disk types: **Thick Provisioned** – where space is allocated at creation. There are further types: - Eager Zeroed – writes 0’s to the entire drive. This increases the time it takes to create the disk, but results in the best performance, even on the first write to each block. - Lazy Zeroed – writes 0’s as each block is first written to. Lazy zero results in a shorter creation time, but reduced performance the first time a block is written to. Subsequent writes, however, have the same performance as on eager-zeroed thick disks. **Thin Provisioned** – where space is allocated and zeroed upon write. There is a higher I/O cost (similar to that of lazy-zeroed thick disks) during the first write to an unwritten file block, but on subsequent writes thin-provisioned disks have the same performance as eager-zeroed thick disks _In all disk types VAAI can improve performance by offloading operations to the storage array._ Some arrays also support thin provisioning at the array level, do not thin provision ESXi disks on thin provisioned array storage as there can be conflicts in provisioning and management. ### Other Notes As noted above for best practice use the same strategies as bare-metal configurations; production storage may be separated at the array level into several disk groups: - Random access for Caché production databases - Sequential access for backups and journals, but also a place for other non-production storage such as test, train, and so on Remember that a datastore is an abstraction of the storage tier and, therefore, it is a logical representation not a physical representation of the storage. Creating a dedicated datastore to isolate a particular I/O workload (whether journal or database files), without isolating the physical storage layer as well, does not have the desired effect on performance. Although performance is key, choice of shared storage depends more on existing or planned infrastructure at site than impact of VMware. As with bare-metal implementations FC SAN is the best performing and is recommended. For FC 8Gbps adapters are the recommended minimum. iSCSI storage is only supported if appropriate network infrastructure is in place, including; minimum 10Gb Ethernet and jumbo frames (MTU 9000) must be supported on all components in the network between server and storage with separation from other traffic. Use multiple VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) controllers for the database virtual machines or virtual machines with high I/O load. PVSCSI can provide some significant benefits by increasing overall storage throughput while reducing CPU utilization. The use of multiple PVSCSI controllers allows the execution of several parallel I/O operations inside the guest operating system. It is also recommended to separate journal I/O traffic from the database I/O traffic through separate virtual SCSI controllers. As a best practice, you can use one controller for the operating system and swap, another controller for journals, and one or more additional controllers for database data files (depending on the number and size of the database data files). Aligning file system partitions is a well-known storage best practice for database workloads. Partition alignment on both physical machines and VMware VMFS partitions prevents performance I/O degradation caused by I/O crossing track boundaries. VMware test results show that aligning VMFS partitions to 64KB track boundaries results in reduced latency and increased throughput. VMFS partitions created using vCenter are aligned on 64KB boundaries as recommended by storage and operating system vendors. # Networking The following key rules should be considered for networking: As noted above VMXNET adapaters have better capabilities than the default E1000 adapter. VMXNET3 allows 10Gb and uses less CPU where as E1000 is only 1Gb. If there is only 1 gigabit network connections between hosts there is not a lot of difference for client to VM communication. However with VMXNET3 it will allow 10Gb between VMs on the same host, which does make a difference especially in multi-tier deployments or where there is high network IO requirements between instances. This feature should also be taken into consideration when planning affinity and antiaffinity DRS rules to keep VMs on the same or separate virtual switches. The E1000 use universal drivers that can be used in Windows or Linux. Once VMware Tools is installed on the guest operating system VMXNET virtual adapters can be installed. The following diagram shows a typical small server configuration with four physical NIC ports, two ports have been configured within VMware for infrastructure traffic: dvSwitch0 for Management and vMotion, and two ports for application use by VMs. NIC teaming and load balancing is used for best throughput and HA. _Figure 3. A typical small server configuration with four physical NIC ports._ # Guest Operating Systems The following are recommended: >It is very important to load VMware tools in to all VM operating systems and keep the tools current. VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine. Without VMware Tools installed in your guest operating system, guest performance lacks important functionality. Its vital that the time is set correctly on all ESXi hosts - it ends up affecting the Guest VMs. The default setting for the VMs is not to sync the guest time with the host - but at certain times the guest still do sync their time with the host and if the time is out has been known to cause major issues. VMware recommends using NTP instead of VMware Tools periodic time synchronization. NTP is an industry standard and ensures accurate timekeeping in your guest. It may be necessary to open the firewall (UDP 123) to allow NTP traffic. # DNS Configuration If your DNS server is hosted on virtualized infrastructure and becomes unavailable, it prevents vCenter from resolving host names, making the virtual environment unmanageable -- however the virtual machines themselves keep operating without problem. # High Availability High availability is provided by features such as VMware vMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High Availability (HA). Caché Database mirroring can also be used to increase uptime. It is important that Caché production systems are designed with n+1 physical hosts. There must be enough resources (e.g. CPU and Memory) for all the VMs to run on remaining hosts in the event of a single host failure. In the event of server failure if VMware cannot allocate enough CPU and memory resources on the remaining server VMware HA will not restart VMs on the remaining servers. ## vMotion vMotion can be used with Caché. vMotion allows migration of a functioning VM from one ESXi host server to another in a fully transparent manner. The OS and applications such as Caché running in the VM have no service interruption. When migrating using vMotion, only the status and memory of the VM—with its configuration—moves. The virtual disk does not need to move; it stays in the same shared-storage location. Once the VM has migrated, it is operating on the new physical host. vMotion can function only with a shared storage architecture (such as Shared SAS array, FC SAN or iSCSI). As Caché is usually configured to use a large amount of shared memory it is important to have adequare network capacity available to vMotion, a 1Gb nework may be OK, however higher bandwidth may be required or multi-NIC vMotion can be configured. ## DRS Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is a method of automating the use of vMotion in a production environment by sharing the workload among different host servers in a cluster. DRS also presents the ability to implement QoS for a VM instance to protect resources for Production VMs by stopping non-production VMs over using resources. DRS collects information about the use of the cluster’s host servers and optimize resources by distributing the VMs’ workload among the cluster’s different servers. This migration can be performed automatically or manually. ## Caché Database Mirror For mission critical tier-1 Caché database application instances requiring the highest availability consider also using [InterSystems synchronous database mirroring.](http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GHA_mirror#GHA_mirror_set_bp_vm) Additional advantages of also using mirroring include: - Separate copies of up-to-date data. - Failover in seconds (faster than restarting a VM then operating System then recovering Caché). - Failover in case of application/Caché failure (not detected by VMware). # vCenter Appliance The vCenter Server Appliance is a preconfigured Linux-based virtual machine optimized for running vCenter Server and associated services. I have been recommending sites with small clusters to use the VMware vCenter Server Appliance as an alternative to installing vCenter Server on a Windows VM. In vSphere 6.5 the appliance is recommended for all deployments. # Summary This post is a rundown of key best practices you should consider when deploying Caché on VMware. Most of these best practices are not unique to Caché but can be applied to other tier-1 business critical deployments on VMware. If you have any questions please let me know via the comments below. Good Day Murray; Anything to look out for VMs hosting Ensemble Databases on vMware being part of VMware Site Recovery Managermaking use of vSphere Replication? Can it be alone be safely used to boot up the VM on the other site? Regards; Anzelem.

InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL is a fully managed cloud service that brings the power of InterSystems IRIS relational database capabilities used by thousands of enterprise customers to a broad audience of application developers and data professionals. InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML is an option to this database-as-a-service that offers easy access to powerful Automated Machine Learning capabilities in a SQL-native form, through a set of simple SQL commands that can easily be embedded in application code to augment them with ML models that run close to the data. Today, we announce the Developer Access Program for these two offerings. Application developers can now self-register for the service, create deployments and start building composable applications and smart data services, with all provisioning, configuration and administration taken care of by the service. Developers can take advantage of a free trial that covers a small deployment for a limited time entirely free of charge in order to get started quickly and experience the performance of InterSystems IRIS Cloud technology. Alternatively, customers will be able to subscribe through the AWS marketplace to deploy the full set of instance sizes, which will get invoiced to their AWS account. To complement and support this core relational database service, the InterSystems Cloud team will continue to rapidly roll out additional features and capabilities throughout the Developer Access Program, and is eager to take your feedback to further enhance the user experience. InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, and the Cloud IntegratedML add-on, are foundational services in the InterSystems Cloud portfolio, and complement a number of successful earlier software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings for the healthcare market. They are building blocks for a composability approach to implement solutions that are easy to provision, scale, and operate in today’s fast-moving technology landscape. Register for the Developer Access Program today, and start building your next masterpiece! During the Developer Access Program, deployments can only be created in the AWS us-east-1 region. These terms and conditions apply.

Hey Developers, We're pleased to invite you to join the next InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 Tech Talk: Using InterSystems Managed FHIR Service in the AWS Cloud on June 30 at 10:00 AM EDT! In this InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 Tech Talk, we’ll focus on using InterSystems Managed FHIR Service in the AWS Cloud. We’ll start with an overview of FHIR, which stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, and is a next generation standards framework for working with healthcare data. You'll learn how to: provision the InterSystems IRIS FHIR server in the cloud; integrate your own data with the FHIR server; use SMART on FHIR applications and enterprise identity, such as Active Directory, with the FHIR server. We will discuss an API-first development approach using the InterSystems IRIS FHIR server. Plus, we’ll cover the scalability, availability, security, regulatory, and compliance requirements that using InterSystems FHIR as a managed service in the AWS Cloud can help you address. Speakers:🗣 @Patrick.Jamieson3621, Product Manager - Health Informatics Platform, InterSystems 🗣 @Anton.Umnikov, Senior Cloud Solution Architect, InterSystems Date: Tuesday, June 30, 2020Time: 10:00 AM EDT ➡️ JOIN THE TECH TALK!

Effective May 16, documentation for versions of InterSystems Caché® and InterSystems Ensemble® prior to 2017.1 will only be available in PDF format on the InterSystems documentation website. Local instances of these versions will continue to present content dynamically.

InterSystems announces General Availability of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect 2024.3 The 2024.3 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform, InterSystems IRIS® for Health, and HealthShare® Health Connect is now Generally Available (GA). Release Highlights In this release, you can expect a host of exciting updates, including: Much faster extension of database and WIJ files Ability to resend messages from Visual Trace Enhanced Rule Editor capabilities Vector search enhancements and more. Please share your feedback through the Developer Community so we can build a better product together. Documentation Details on all the highlighted features are available through these links below: InterSystems IRIS 2024.3 documentation, release notes, and the Upgrade Checklist. InterSystems IRIS for Health 2024.3 documentation, release notes, and the Upgrade Checklist. Health Connect 2024.3 documentation, release notes, and the Upgrade Checklist. In addition, check out the upgrade information for this release. Early Access Programs (EAPs) There are many EAPs available now. Check out this page and register to those you are interested. How to get the software? As usual, Continuous Delivery (CD) releases come with classic installation packages for all supported platforms, as well as container images in Docker container format. Classic installation packages Installation packages are available from the WRC's Continuous Delivery Releases page for InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and Health Connect. Additionally, kits can also be found in the Evaluation Services website. Availability and Package Information This release comes with classic installation packages for all supported platforms, as well as container images in Docker container format. For a complete list, refer to the Supported Platforms document. Installation packages and preview keys are available from the WRC's preview download site or through the evaluation services website. The build number for this Continuous Delivery release is: 2024.3.0.217.0. Container images are available from the InterSystems Container Registry. Containers are tagged as both "2024.3" or "latest-cd".

InterSystems Announces General Availability of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect 2025.1 The 2025.1 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform, InterSystems IRIS® for HealthTM, and HealthShare® Health Connect is now Generally Available (GA). This is an Extended Maintenance (EM) release. Release Highlights In this exciting release, users can expect several new features and enhancements, including: Advanced Vector Search Capabilities A new disk-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) index significantly accelerates vector search queries, yielding sub-second responses across millions of vectors. Access the following exercise to learn more - Vectorizing and Searching Text with InterSystems SQL . Enhanced Business Intelligence Automatic dependency analysis in IRIS BI Cube building and synchronization, ensuring consistency and integrity across complex cube dependencies. Improved SQL and Data Management Introduction of standard SQL pagination syntax (LIMIT... OFFSET..., OFFSET... FETCH...). New LOAD SQL command for simplified bulk import of DDL statements. Enhanced ALTER TABLE commands to convert between row and columnar layouts seamlessly. Optimized Database Operations Reduced journal record sizes for increased efficiency. Faster database compaction, particularly for databases with lots of big string content. Increased automation when adding new databases to a mirror. New command-line utility for ECP management tasks. Strengthened Security Compliance Support for cryptographic libraries compliant with FIPS 140-3 standards. Modernized Interoperability UI Opt-in to a revamped Production Configuration and DTL Editor experience, featuring source control integration, VS Code compatibility, enhanced filtering, split-panel views, and more. Please see this Developer Community article for more information about how to opt-in and provide feedback. Expanded Healthcare Capabilities Efficient bulk FHIR ingestion and scheduling, including integrity checks and resource management. Enhanced FHIR Bulk Access and improved FHIR Search Operations. New Developer Experience Features Embedded Python support within the DTL Editor, allowing Python-skilled developers to leverage the InterSystems platform more effectively. Watch the following video to learn more - Using Embedded Python in the BPL and DTL Editors. Enhanced Observability with OpenTelemetry Introduction of tracing capabilities in IRIS for detailed observability into web requests and application performance. Please share your feedback through the Developer Community so we can build a better product together. Documentation Details on all the highlighted features are available through these links below: InterSystems IRIS 2025.1 documentation and release notes. InterSystems IRIS for Health 2025.1 documentation and release notes. Health Connect 2025.1 documentation and release notes. In addition, check out the upgrade impact checklist for an easily navigable overview of all changes you need to be aware of when upgrading to this release. In particular, please note that InterSystems IRIS 2025.1 introduces a new journal file format version, which is incompatible with earlier releases and therefore imposes certain limitations on mixed-version mirror setups. See the corresponding documentation for more details. Early Access Programs (EAPs) There are many EAPs available now. Check out this page and register to those you are interested. Download the Software As usual, Extended Maintenance (EM) releases come with classic installation packages for all supported platforms, as well as container images in Docker container format. Classic Installation Packages Installation packages are available from the WRC's InterSystems IRIS page for InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health, and WRC’s HealthShare page for Health Connect. Kits can also be found in the Evaluation Services website. Availability and Package Information This release comes with classic installation packages for all supported platforms, as well as container images in Docker container format. For a complete list, refer to the Supported Platforms document. The build number for this Extended Maintenance release is 2025.1.0.223.0. Container images are available from the InterSystems Container Registry. Containers are tagged as both "2025.1" and "latest-em".