Using the Bahmni Vagrant Box for a Low (IT) Resource Health Centre

The wiki for Bahmni indicates that the Vagrant Box implementation is aimed at a development/evaluation scenario and that CentOS is the route for production.

We are a relatively small (44 bed) charity maternity hospital in Tanzania. With a deep desire to direct as much of our resources as possible to our patients.

For better or worse we have elected to run our server (maybe one day servers) under Windows Sever 2016 Essentials. The Bahmni/OpenMRS distribution in the form of Vagrant/Virtual box is appealing in treating the application as just an appliance (though configured to our needs).

We anticipate maybe no more than maximum 6 concurrent users and are primarily focused on the clinical components.

I would welcome comments on the wisdom of using this environment in a production setting.

What features of Bahmni are you planning on using? In particular from the below:

  1. OpenMRS/EMR
  2. OpenELIS (Lab)
  3. OpenERP (Odoo)
  4. PACS/DCM4Chee

The more components you choose, the more the RAM is needed for its running. If you can give 8GB or more of RAM to the Virtual Box, I feel then its OK for you to run it that way (for all 4 components). One of the very small hospitals in Sierra Leone is using the VM on Ubuntu for EMR part only of Bahmni in production, and that seems to work fine.

To give more RAM to Virtual Box you just have to edit the “VagrantFile”. See this line: https://github.com/Bahmni/bahmni-vagrant/blob/master/Vagrantfile#L12. Instead of 3092, to set it to 8GB, you will need to replace it with the value: 8192

A Windows machine may be more vulnerable to virus attack, or might need restarts after some periods of time – but if you are more comfortable that way – I feel its OK to use the VM option… as long as you give appropriate RAM. You can test it for your scenario for a few days, and once you feel comfortable, move ahead with it.

As usual, do remember to setup daily backups for your database, and any other files that you generate in Bahmni.

Right now our interest is OpenMRS and your extensions to that.

We are running ERPNext in another VitualBox.

Not sure if we will use OpenElis for quite a while.

What size RAM would you recommend for just the MRS functions?

I feel just for EMR part (OpenMRS/Bahmni) 4 GB should be sufficient, although the more you give, the better of course it becomes.

Thanks I will start with the default and increase to 4GB if when we see issues.