Application servers, number required for 30 concurrent users.

Business Central/NAV User Forum
1

I am a project officer working with a Microsoft reseller on setting up NAV ERP for our government dept which has 30 concurrent users maximum. We supply equipment to the disability services on a loan basis then maintain, collect, clean, repair and put back in the warehouse for the next client. We also do small modifications to the home like building access ramps and handrails according to therapist instructions.

We have been told that we will need 3 application servers. This has rather blown the budget. What criteria would the supplier have used to determine this and is it normal for NAV to need 3 separate servers?

Thanks,

Patrick Page

2

It depends a lot of the use will be giving to application servers. Application servers (NAS) are related mainly related to custom code. Can you define witch tasks will be running in those application servers. Are you using posting routines in NAS ? Are you using ADCS ? etc.

3

It is quite common to have 3 servers, but what determines this is project parameters. Not just number of users, but functional requirements. For a site with 3 servers I am thinking one is for the database, one is for terminal services for remote access, and one would be for NAS or maybe some other purpose. You have not told us anything about the requirements though, so it is impossible to say anything useful about it.

4

In my experience, a NAS can handle a lot of code before getting “overloaded”. When estimating how many application servers are needed, good arguments should be supplied as to what functionality each NAS is responsible for executing. There can be many reasons for recommending 3 application servers but it could also be because of limitid knowledge of what an application server can do. You should seek the arguments of having three servers and come back and present them here.

5

Thanks for your considered replies. It seems that the supplier had provided us with an infrastructure guideline that covered the possibility of providing a system that could handle “hundreds of thousands of tables” as future capacity that we could grow into. Meanwhile we will just have to do with NAS on one server and have a system that can handle maybe tens of thousands of tables for now.