Max number of Network Connector clients
- Whats the maximum number of concurrent users using Network Connector client anyone has seen in the real world? What type/model of appliance was it?
Answers
- Hi Mark,
This thread has been open for 4 months, so my guess is you won't find your answer with the participants of this forum. I'll try to reach you personally and we can try to come up with a creative way to survey this sort of info. That does sound fair?
Ben Ari
Microsoft CSS IAG Support
Sammamish, WA- Marked As Answer byBen AriMSFT, OwnerTuesday, November 10, 2009 4:37 PM
All Replies
Hi Mark,
As you might have determined based on the silence this is a hard number to calculate. The primary reason this is so difficult is the number of variables involved. As you know we offer IAG as a virtual machine (.vhd) for use in Windows 2008 Server Hyper V implementations or you can also buy IAG as a appliance from an OEM. Whether virtual or an appliance the characteristics of the drives (spindle speed, seek times, etc.), memory (amount and type), and connectivity (10M, 100M, 1G, 10G) contribute to the overall performance of the server as a whole. Beyond this the type of applications being published and thier own profiles begin to play into the overall performance equation as well. And to add to that the bandwidth use of the application and users are to be considered and you should begin to see why there is no single number guidance on these types of questions.
What you can and should be doing is performing meaningful and measured testing of the performance of the IAG server configured as close to the final configuration as possible. By closely documenting the configuration and applications in use you can develop a snapshot of the 60-80 percent capabilities of the system (not the server). I would purposely not run the capacity to 100% because this is unrealistic and no server or computing system operates at this performance level, at least not for long. If you use these 60-80 percent numbers you should be able to determine the maximum numbers based on some linear mathmatics.
So how do you know the 60-80 percent capacity; get out perfmon and start monitoring the system. You need to look at the system as a subset of systems (memory, disk, I/O, process, etc.) working as a whole. Within each of these categories look for bottlenecks. For example, if your I/O is running 70% of the total available bandwidth I would not expect to be able to double the number of users and still maintain a reasonably responsive server. I would also consider this a bottleneck in the performance. You might find that you can upgrade the network cards or change them out so that they are taking advantage of the features in the scalable networking pack. That may add some "breath" to the system and allow you to increase the number of users.
The end result is that there are many variables to be considered. Your mileage may vary but ultimately the maximum number of users is probably a number unique to your configuration.
Dan- Marked As Answer byBen AriMSFT, OwnerThursday, October 22, 2009 9:26 PM
- Unmarked As Answer byMark Resnik - MBR Security Thursday, November 05, 2009 9:31 PM
What I'm looking for is someone out there whose only or at least primary usage of IAG is for Network Connector and knowing how many concurrent users their system can handle? A "benchmark" per se, as I want this info to help size which appliance or how many appliances a prospective IAG administrator may need. (I am NOT looking how to measure where my capicity max is on a system I have deployed and have access to) Must be somone out there whose done 100 max concurrect NC users? 200? 500?
As Dan mentions, all systems and configurations are not alike, so at a minimum please also include what appliance you are running this on. If there are any other details of the configuration that are unique to your deployment that may affect perfermorce this info is a "nice to have".
Thanks,
Mark- Hi Mark,
This thread has been open for 4 months, so my guess is you won't find your answer with the participants of this forum. I'll try to reach you personally and we can try to come up with a creative way to survey this sort of info. That does sound fair?
Ben Ari
Microsoft CSS IAG Support
Sammamish, WA- Marked As Answer byBen AriMSFT, OwnerTuesday, November 10, 2009 4:37 PM
