All, I am working on a project which requires Axapta to be deployed and hosted centrally out of a single data center. There are more than 400 concurrent users accessing this application from various countries all over the globe - Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America. I understand from the technical architecture of Axapta that the best way to deploy such a infrastructure is to go for the following approach due to low latency requirements for Axapta (<50ms): TS Client → TS Server (with Axapta Client Published) → AOS → DB (SQL Server 2000) (OR) Citrix Client (ICA) → Citrix Server Farm (with AOS Published) → AOS → DB (SQL Server 2000) We have planned to implement Axapta 3.0. Would any of you share the performance of Axapta on a WAN (VPN based) using TS or Citrix with respect to response time. End users are looking at < 5sec response time. Can it be achieved? Let me know. Thanks in advance. Cheers, Srikanth
I have tried the ThinClient using a VPN over dial-up and it worked OK. Not very fast but not slow either. The ping replies were exiding 80ms and the dial-up was at 26.xKb and than the VPN (PPTP). Without knowing too much about your setup and assuming that your users in the other countries are in a fixed location I would look at a VPN over high speed connection. Alin
The links to Internet from the end user sites will be based on Leased Lines.
It should not be a problem. The “real” traffic will stay between TS Server → AOS → DB. That means inside the data center. The only thing that will cause traffic and maybe slow the connection is reports. I don’t have any numbers, but a large report that are sent from the data center to the clients printer, will take some time(=bandwith) to send. All depending on the type of connection. We have customers running Axapta on TS Server and VPN with no problem. And the same goes for XAL and TS Server. But i shoud add that our customers have <20 concurrent users. Peter K
We’re currently running a configuration similar to the one you are discribing, so I have some experience with the case. Our solution is scaled for approx. 200 users, but currently we are running at just above 50 concurrent (all companies are not included yet). We’ve been running this since 1/1-03. The “data center” is in Norway, and I have clients in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Netherlands, all connected via VPN lines maintained by ourselves thru regular internet connections. Our experience so far is quite poor. First of all, the database server needs to be a monster. Our compaq DL580G2 based cluster (approx €60000) is barely delivering enough performance for 50 users, so you really need to think of that. The hardware was set up after numerous performance calculations and advises - but is simply not up to the job. Now, when we confront our dealer, they say “you should have chosen Oracle instead”. That’s a little late for us now, but keep that in mind. Next, a solution based on Axapta thin client technology itself is out of the question. We were going to start using this initially; since out average response time was about 40 ms on the current VPN link. Man, we were up for a shock. Some windows would take literally minutes to open (actually timed some thing to take more than 5 minutes to open), even though the average opening time would be 10-15 seconds. Once you had open your windows, some processes would run under quite acceptable speed while others would take ages. In breif, we quickly found out that this was nothing even to consider (a little late in the process though). So, the solution quickly became Citrix based. I would say that is the only way to deliver this like it is right now. It works with some tricky problems to solve (like autoconfiguring Axapta for different users on the same server with different languages on multiple servers, different printer issues etc) but those are mainly Citrix based. If you want to run it without Citrix, using just Terminal Services, you would have to have quite technical understanding users I would say. The next thing you should know, is that Axapta is very processor and RAM demanding. Either way you configure it; using 2-tier on the TS/Citrix servers or using 3-tier on the TS/Citrix and AOS, you would probably have to have a lot of them. We currently run 2-tier on the Citrix server (even though they recommend going thru AOS for best performance; simply because the AOS has some other issues with caching and delayed updates that caused a lot of problems). I have 4 Citrix servers (2x Xeon 2.4 GHz, 1GB RAM, Ultra 320 SCSI) currently serving 50 concurrent users; and that’s needed. If you choose to deploy using AOS in addition, you would just move your load to the AOS server. Then you need a bunch of those instead (and they even charge you license per AOS server), even though they say that this creates less load and can’t be compared; my AOS server (spec is about the same as the Citrix server mentioned above) quicly peeked at 100% processor serving just 7-8 clients. What I’ve come to realise, is that this all comes down to what you expect as a “reasonable” speed at the client. This may vary a lot, but I would say that if speed is an issue for you, Axapta should not be your choice if you don’t have vaste amount of money to spend on hardware. Axapta has some great sides, but speed is not one of them!
We are currently implementing Axapta over 3 sites with AOS and DB server sitting out of HO and the Factories connecting to the main server. We did testing on 3 types of communication: ISDN, VSAT and Fiber Optic. The test clearly gave counters which showed that Axapta performs pretty bad on ISDN and VSAT. After seeing the results, we have opted for Fiber Optic for network. The performance is pretty good but we hv to see when we really move into production environment. Cheers,