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It's my first time asking a question, so please let me know if I've done something wrong or can be more clear/concise in my phrasing.

I've recently taken over service for a dental office that utilizes Patterson Eaglesoft 18 as their practice management solution. To help them meet compliance, we moved them from a workgroup-based environment to a domain-based system. In the process, we setup a virtual domain controller and also virtualized their installation of Eaglesoft Server 18. This was all done on a custom built machine, using Windows Server 2012 R2 as both the host and virtual OS's.

After the setup was complete, most aspects of the software functioned normally without any issue. However, the client systems have trouble performing very specific database operations. In particular, they're unable to consistently display medical history information for patients. Data can be committed from the workstation, but the information will not populate in the form when loading the patient information.

After working with the software vendor for an extended period of time, their answer was to run the Server software on the host machine as they don't offer support for virtualized environments. I didn't really believe that could be the issue, but after doing as I was told, the issue was resolved.

I've started over twice with clean installations of Windows Server 2012R2 on multiple Hyper-V VM's and have run into the same issue consistently. The only way to make the software work properly is to run it on the host machine. If it helps at all, Eaglesoft uses Sybase as its core database engine. Can any of you think of a reason that the software wouldn't operate properly in a virtual environment? Can you think of other cases where this has happened?

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tl;dr: Practice management software only works when run on host machine; won't work on Hyper-V system. Any thoughts?

stephancasas
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  • It's strange that that doesn't work. It's quite normal that the vendor won't support it, not for any technical reason, but because they already have your money. – Michael Hampton Jan 14 '17 at 06:27
  • Shouldn't make any difference if the VM is configured properly. Other than that, the question is difficult to reply to with a quality answer. – Daniel Jan 14 '17 at 11:16
  • That's what I told the vendor. I'm gonna try it in VirtualBox and VMware to see if there's any difference. – stephancasas Jan 20 '17 at 23:18

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We have supported Eaglesoft installations and other Dental PMs and one issue that always comes up is that the client side never releases their connections to the database. In our environments this caused headaches for any laptop user that would be running on battery over wireless. The client would crash every time the laptop would go to any form of sleep or hibernation. In your situation are you having issues accessing the "smart docs"?

NOW-Admin
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  • It's not SmartDoc giving us the issue, it's actually the medical history editor. We're able to load the form and commit a change, but not able to view the actual data on the workstation. We can see the change has been committed if we access Eaglesoft through the server VM, but the workstations won't populate the information. – stephancasas Jan 20 '17 at 23:16
  • Is there an issue with the resources available to the DB VM? Do you have any issues with ping response from the workstation to the DB server? What speed are the network connections to the workstation and to the server? if everything is not on 1Gb connections, I would fix this first. – NOW-Admin Jan 22 '17 at 00:32