We are upgrading from Navision Financials 2.0 to Attain 3.7. We have 45 concurrent users…12 of these accessing the Navision Server via Citrix Metaframe. The converted database is 18Gb. The server runs NT 4.0 and has a 36Gb SCSI mirrored drive and 1GB memory. We are planning to have one database file, not multiple across logical drives. We are concerned that we may have performance issues. The problem is, we won’t know until we implement. Does anyone think that our server configuration/hardware will cause performance issues? If so, what would be the ulimate configuration.
I would recommend You the following (if we are talking about Natvie DBMS): - 1 CPU - 1GB RAM - 10 disks (15k rpm) in RAID-1 (OS and exe’s on the first pair and then 4 db-files on the rest) - No other applications on the server You shoould NOT have just one db-file and to get performance You must spread the files over different physical drives. Also consider moving all users to Citrix (including their office suite, mail and other apps). It’s a lot simpler to maintain that way.
Two things I don’t agree Lars; - Make that 2Gb (1Gb for OS, 1Gb for Navision) - If you really want performance; give them there own PC with 1Gb en in the local cache settings change it to 500Mb.
I do not agree with the Raid solution. It has always been said from Navision, that Raid 0 is the fastes solution, when you are using a Native database. /Andhilda
I forgot to mention that our current server is 866mz. Does the processing speed alone warrant a new server?
RAID 0? Running any kind of critical system on a RAID 0 platform is just begging for problems. I wouldn’t be caught dead running a database on RAID 0. Navision has always recommended the use of RAID 1 as the underlying storage for the database files. This can be confirmed quite easily in the “Installation and System Management” PDF manual located in the Doc folder of any Navision Product CD. RAID 0 is, of course, faster but security plays a much more important role when dealing with database and mission-critical systems. It would be crazy for Navision to endorse it!
Absolutely agree Nelson. Noone runs on RAID0. And is it really faster when running native?? You onli get one commitcache, so You might get a bottleneck there. And Erik: With 45 users a cahce of 750Mb should do and thenlet OS have 250. And by setting local cahe You only cache objects not data. I don’t see why You should set the object cache to 500MB when the total size of all objects isn’t even near that size.
If your using NT4 you are correct but with W2K3 250Mb for the OS is not enough. On the client I’m not talking about object cache but about “local DBMS cache”. With some processes it really makes a difference. For example waiting for 1 hour of only 3 min.
For general applications, RAID 0 is faster than RAID 1 or a single HDD. For the Navision DB, you may well have a good point with the cache. Maybe some bored SysAdmin with an extra server wants to make a benchmark and post the results? [;)]
Erik. Can You explain the “local DBMS cache”-thing a little more? When connecting to a server the client doesn’t do any caching of data (only objects). The local DBMS cache is only used when using a local database. So how can this setting affect performance when using a server? And Yes. You’re right when talking about RAM. w2k3 really needs a little bit more then NT4 and memory isn’t that expensive.
If you increase the dbms cache size some codeunits/reports are much, much, much faster. I believe it has something to do with temp table vars.
OK. I’ll give it a try