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[Chris France]

Hello,
We are in development with NAV 2017. We have a NAV Server and a separate SQL server for our dev environment. When we begin testing and move towards “go live” should we consider multiple server instances to ensure performance is not an issue? We will have between 130 to 160 active users.

Thanks

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Chris France
Colortech, Inc.
Morristown TN
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[Robert Thomas]

I’d also be interested in this. I have talked to a few VARs for Azure and NAV for recommendations on HA and Backups. I’ll share what I found out.

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Robert Thomas
Stamptech Inc
Chester VA
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[Chris France]

Let me know what you find out. I would like to share information and see what will work best. I have been working with VARS as well. I feel I get the best feedback from people actually running live systems.

Thanks

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Chris France
Colortech, Inc.
Morristown TN
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[Ian Ray]

Possibly. I have read discussions of using a Network Load Balancing cluster for installations with less active users than 130. This would also allow for a bit of “failover” as if one server was down, users would still connect to the other server.

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Ian Ray
Cypress Grove
Arcata CA
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[Bob Stahr]

You’ll want to breakup your users across several middle tier servers.
We are at ~ 65 max concurrent users.  Our middle tier is a single physical server but it has 3 instances 1 for “Users” a second that we set up separately for Jet reports — in an attempt to keep long running JET reports from effecting other user responsiveness, and a third that is our “webservices/automation” middle tier where we run in data ports and our BizTalk service that is doing integration with our shipping application and ~ 15 ecom websites.  We have done some configuration tuning for the 3 instances, the biggest advantage is that when we have to bounce the Jet or ws tier it does not kick all the users out of their sessions.

A load balancer two split users between 2 or more instances would indeed be a good addition for stability as it could redirect users, or at least new sessions to an “up” server if there was one offline.

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Bob Stahr
Director ITS
Sunrise Identity
Bellevue WA
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[Curt Lambert]

We found that we maintain a single SQL Server instance but have an active/active fail over configuration for our SQL 2008 R2 environment.  This was a non VM SQL Server configuration.  As we moved to the new SQL 2014 configuration in a full VM environment we have found some performance issues along a transaction boundary if the windows servers (2012) such as IIS or the RTC do not share the same VM host as the SQL Server.  I works just fine on multiple hosts, it is just a little slower.  This is not a capacity issue in that the server had minimal load. We did not notice this in our development system because it was a single VM host so all the windows server were on the same host.  Our production VM has multiple hosts for purposes of fail over and load balancing.  We run all of our servers  in VM.  My message is simple make sure and performance test your production configuration if you are using VM with SQL Server, IIS and the RTC.  I suggest you look at what hosts are running what servers.  The VM tech person position is it should make no difference however it did for us and still does.  We are very sensitive to performance because we run scanners at multiple remote sites that require response time of a few seconds that all use Navision web services and code units. 

If you do not run VM then these comments are not relevant.  For the VM side of the group so to speak we continue to review the setup and configuration of VM to identify the nature of the slow down.  We are experimenting with the High Availability features.  There are some very good documents available for SQL performance in VM that are available via the search engines.

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Curt Lambert
NK Parts Industries Inc
Sidney OH
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[Will Cleveland]

Is anyone using all SSD’s in their servers?

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Will Cleveland
South Atlantic, LLC
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[Chris France]

We are running all servers using VMWare. Our NAV Server and SQL server are on the same host. Our SAN uses SSD’s and traditional drives. The SSD’s handle the busy work. 
We are not lacking in VM host or SAN capability. The key is proper setup.
SInce we are in development, we see no performance issues. My concern is once we begin using the system with a full user load. 
I have been through other ERP implementations, and it is not fun when you switch over and performance is poor. 
One recommendation given to me is, run multiple NAV server instances and dedicate X number of users per server for maximum performance.

Thanks

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Chris France
Colortech, Inc.
Morristown TN
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[Jason Wilder]

There is a real issue with multiple service tiers that you need to consider (this exists in NAV 2016 not sure about NAV 2017 but guessing it is there as well).

It has to do with NAV Service Tier Caching.  Service Tier Cache is automatically synchronized from one Service Tier to the other.  It could take 30 seconds to 1 minute for the Service Tier to fully sync rthe cache.  This can cause some pretty weird behavior depending on what types of customizations you have. 

If you have 2 service tiers for Clients then remember that 1/2 your users will not see the most updated data that the other half is doing for at least 30 seconds.  Most of the time this is ok but once you start involving integration’s with web services (another seperate service tier) you will have issues.  There are some semi work-arounds such as using the SelectLatestVersion in your code but we still get some really weird results sometimes.

I could certainly speak more of this with specific examples offline if you would like to message me.

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Jason Wilder
Senior Application Developer
Stonewall Kitchen
York ME
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[Randy Moore]

We are on 2013 so it may not be exactly apples to apples.

We have approx. 230 concurrent users at all times.

Our Setup is as follows:  All servers are VMware virtual servers running on multiple hosts for HA.
2 SQL / NAV server (1 prod, 1 dev)
4 Service Tier Servers (the first 3 are running 2 Service Tier Instances, the last one is dedicated to dev)

We manually assign groups of users to Service Tiers.  It was recommended to use a load balancer, but it did not seem easy to set up and I did not see an easy was to limit the sessions per Service Tier.  We try to keep the # of users per Service Tier at less than 40 for optimal performance.

As far as the cache things goes.  We have never had an issue with data being cached and not showing to the other Service Tiers.  Where the cache has been an issue is with modifications.  Sometimes the Service Tiers need to be restarted to get the changes from another Tier.

Good luck in your set up!

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Randy Moore
Vortex Industries, Inc.
Irvine CA
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[Geovanny Fuentes]

This is what I have:
1. Load balancing a big plus.
2. Create say 3 services NAVString1, NAVString2, NAVString3. But people will connect to NAVString. Without any number as the Load balancer will assign users to the proper 1,2,3 connections in the back ground.
3. For those that are VIP connections, we created just a special NAVSpecial1 connection for them to use as their was only 8 people there. This way they will not interfere with normal processing and we could monitor them separately. 

4. Create another service for JetReport, JobQueue etc. Those should have their own connections.
5. You can now assign the proper Timeout/RAM/etc being used to each service running.
6. You can monitor performance, restart service as needed in a control environment.
Plus if you run a session monitoring in NAV you can see which users is connected to which service running.

Good luck.

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Geovanny Fuentes
San Diego CA
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[Mark Miranda]

In practical application, 130 users is too many for a single service tier instance.  We typically recommend 70-80 users per tier (sometimes less depending on the load the users are putting on them).  The general guidelines are:

• 10-15 Dynamics NAV users per processor core / logic processor
• 96-128MB of memory per user

Load balancing across multiple servers (not server instances) provides additional fault tolerance if desired.  I have found spreading the users across multiple servers to be particularly beneficial when troubleshooting issues.  For instance, if users on both servers are “slow” then the issue might be more SQL related rather than NAV Server related.

If a load balancer is not being used, it can still be beneficial to be able to split users up onto different service tier instances.  We often suggest creative a service tier instance per department or some kind of other logical grouping.  Again, you can see if some perform better than others as well as be able to restart individual groups of users without affecting ALL users.

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Mark Miranda
Director of Information Technology
Western Computer
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[Chris France]

Thank you for the information.

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Chris France
Colortech, Inc.
Morristown TN
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[Jason Wilder]

Remember the older versions of the service tier (such as NAV 2013) were not 64 bit and did not do service tier caching.  I believe these were both introduced in NAV 2016.  Theoretically you should be able to handle a lot more than 40 users per service tier since it is 64bit.  We are NAV 2016 and have about 70 users on one service tier and could do more.

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Jason Wilder
Senior Application Developer
Stonewall Kitchen
York ME
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[Soren Smith]

Hi Chris,

As you can see from the different replies you have put focus on a very sore area in NAV, because there are no load-balacing of user connections.  It would be great if they finally deliver this as standard; but again it would require some alterations to the config file for the user start-up.

To avoid confusion – there have been a lot of attempt to do something with a “ring-round” concept, but it is still not proper Load Balance, because it is running based on number of users per tier  –  not what they acutally are doing, which is a totally different concpt to implement.

From the outset let us remember that “Multi-tier” environments is a step back in time to before 1980, where we had a secetary to do a lot of the paper work for us.  More users per secretary, the longer it took to get the papers back – and the same goes for the NAV Service -Tiers  🙂

My personal preference is always to have dedicated service-tiers based on what the users are doing.
You can easily have 50+ users there are doing light “look-up” and customer, vendor, item update – but perhaps only have 10-15 users on a warehouse or production tier, because these generates much more traffic and actual postings/updates in the system.

I also recommend that ytou don’t use the famous “Port Sharing” functionality!
It won’t do you much good to have 6 tiers if they all run on port 7049.  That is still a bottleneck in the system.

I will suggest to use i.e.

           NST 0           Port 9001              ( Client Service )
                                         9002              ( SOAP Service )
                                         9003              ( OData Service )
                                         9004              ( Mgt. Service )
           NST 1           Port 9011
           NST 2           Port 9021
           NST 3           Port 9031
           NST 4           Port 9041

….. and so on.  Naturally name your NST instances with a logical name
The NST 0 is only for use from IT Department, and the only one with a Mgt. Service port started.
Unless the users need access to OData/SOAP – don’t define these either on the other NST.

If you really want to be advanced in the SETUP you can avoid using Port No. in the Client Config file – but you will have to define it at Server Level instead.

I hope you can use the above as inspiration, but in short  –  Multiple NST will be the right thing for you with the number of users you have.

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Soren Smith
Nielsen & Partners Ltd
Cape Town
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