I was wondering what people’s experience is in achieving a resilient architecture within NAV2013. By this I mean, is it possible to install more than one NAV application server so that if one server is unavailable (perhaps because of a hardware error) the overall application is still accessible.
We’re looking to implement NAV for a large user set (perhaps around 300 users) and so it might be the case that multiple NAV application servers are needed to meet the load requirements this would have.
The NAV 2013 Service Tier is supported in a Network Load Balancing cluster. This does not provide dynamic load balancing, but rather is intended to support a level of fault tolerance.
On a related note, would you happen to know of any “rule of thumb” in terms of how many users are supported per NAV application server? Obviously I understand that this will very much depend on the nature of the users, but I was wondering if there are any documents/guides that would give a rough idea.
The number I’ve gotten from the Technical Advisory group at Microsoft has been 75 to 150 users. But they also admit there has been no real load testing. So that’s really just an estimate. I tend to use the lower end number when making recommendations.
They also don’t provide any sort of guidelines on how you should ramp up memory as the load increases. Just minimums.
Correct. I think a good “rule of thumb” with a cluster would be to go with a “N+1” configuration. That is to use 5 servers to support the 300 users. So you could lose 1 server and still have the “75 users per” ratio.