pshearer
Active Member
Has anyone tried running OneWorld XE or ERP8 on a Citrix server running Windows 2003 Ent with 16GB of ram? If so how many users were you able to scale up to?
altquark
Legendary Poster
Hi Paul
In theory, the answer to that question should be "32" - no matter how many users you can REALLY get on the server, you still should always follow JDE sizing recommendations - which haven't been adjusted for the new technologies or for 64bit.
However, with a 64bit Windows 2003 machine and with a true 16Gb of available memory - providing the processing power is available (say, with two quad core 3.0GHz processors giving 8 cores) - then I wouldn't have any hesitation to being able to see around 250 concurrent users before seeing severe problems. Its easy to calculate - an Xe user uses approximately 50Mb of memory per session. Add an additional 10Mb for other overheads with the OS - and you're looking at 60x250=15Gb - with extra memory left over for operating system processes and overhead for redundant scalability (in case another Terminal Server fails for example).
HOWEVER, there are some caveats.
First of all, when you start loading on the number of users - then you're going to move the bottleneck away from CPU and Memory - and you're going to start to see bottlenecks at the NIC level (Network card). So, obviously ensure you have multiple Gigabit connectivity to the database - since 250 concurrent sales order entry users could be generated 2Gigabit/s in network traffic - and you're going to have some major impacts all over your architecture to support that.
Also, again depending on the functionality used and the frequency of the users performing tasks, you're going to have some bottlenecks on the local disk performance. I like using RAID5 with 15K RPM SCSI3 drives over several arms with the OS on a seperate mirrored partition - but I have seen some really badly configured drive setups for terminal servers. Remember, you're reading the spec files from the disk - and the performance of opening those spec files 250 times is going to incur some huge impacts.
I still prefer to size smaller boxes - and have more of them available to me. It provides redundancy, a better method of architecting individualistic paths, and, to be honest, is a lot, lot less expensive than purchasing a single "large" server. Just because its theoretically possible to get your entire user base onto a single box, doesn't mean its a good idea !
In theory, the answer to that question should be "32" - no matter how many users you can REALLY get on the server, you still should always follow JDE sizing recommendations - which haven't been adjusted for the new technologies or for 64bit.
However, with a 64bit Windows 2003 machine and with a true 16Gb of available memory - providing the processing power is available (say, with two quad core 3.0GHz processors giving 8 cores) - then I wouldn't have any hesitation to being able to see around 250 concurrent users before seeing severe problems. Its easy to calculate - an Xe user uses approximately 50Mb of memory per session. Add an additional 10Mb for other overheads with the OS - and you're looking at 60x250=15Gb - with extra memory left over for operating system processes and overhead for redundant scalability (in case another Terminal Server fails for example).
HOWEVER, there are some caveats.
First of all, when you start loading on the number of users - then you're going to move the bottleneck away from CPU and Memory - and you're going to start to see bottlenecks at the NIC level (Network card). So, obviously ensure you have multiple Gigabit connectivity to the database - since 250 concurrent sales order entry users could be generated 2Gigabit/s in network traffic - and you're going to have some major impacts all over your architecture to support that.
Also, again depending on the functionality used and the frequency of the users performing tasks, you're going to have some bottlenecks on the local disk performance. I like using RAID5 with 15K RPM SCSI3 drives over several arms with the OS on a seperate mirrored partition - but I have seen some really badly configured drive setups for terminal servers. Remember, you're reading the spec files from the disk - and the performance of opening those spec files 250 times is going to incur some huge impacts.
I still prefer to size smaller boxes - and have more of them available to me. It provides redundancy, a better method of architecting individualistic paths, and, to be honest, is a lot, lot less expensive than purchasing a single "large" server. Just because its theoretically possible to get your entire user base onto a single box, doesn't mean its a good idea !
gregglarkin
Legendary Poster
[ QUOTE ]
I still prefer to size smaller boxes - and have more of them available to me. It provides redundancy, a better method of architecting individualistic paths, and, to be honest, is a lot, lot less expensive than purchasing a single "large" server. Just because its theoretically possible to get your entire user base onto a single box, doesn't mean its a good idea !
[/ QUOTE ]
Can I hear an "AMEN!" to brother Jon! I'm a big fan of the don't put all of your eggs in one basket club. If that big wonking Citrix server goes down, you're up the crick without a paddle.
Not to hijack the thread, but I'll give a hypothetical reason to disagree with myself. A good use for really big iron would be a shop that is supporting a global 8.12 instance. Set up multiple web servers on a vm-ware server. One set for North America, one set for Europe, one set for Asia. Rather than buying a bunch of webservers, vm-ware will apply the horsepower to the webservers in rotation as JDE "chases the sun." Since each region uses a different set of web servers, you build in time for package deploys and other maintenance. Pretty cool idea.
Gregg
I still prefer to size smaller boxes - and have more of them available to me. It provides redundancy, a better method of architecting individualistic paths, and, to be honest, is a lot, lot less expensive than purchasing a single "large" server. Just because its theoretically possible to get your entire user base onto a single box, doesn't mean its a good idea !
[/ QUOTE ]
Can I hear an "AMEN!" to brother Jon! I'm a big fan of the don't put all of your eggs in one basket club. If that big wonking Citrix server goes down, you're up the crick without a paddle.
Not to hijack the thread, but I'll give a hypothetical reason to disagree with myself. A good use for really big iron would be a shop that is supporting a global 8.12 instance. Set up multiple web servers on a vm-ware server. One set for North America, one set for Europe, one set for Asia. Rather than buying a bunch of webservers, vm-ware will apply the horsepower to the webservers in rotation as JDE "chases the sun." Since each region uses a different set of web servers, you build in time for package deploys and other maintenance. Pretty cool idea.
Gregg
altquark
Legendary Poster
[ QUOTE ]
Not to hijack the thread, but I'll give a hypothetical reason to disagree with myself. ...blah blah blah... vm-ware server....blah blah...vm-ware ...blah blah.. Pretty cool idea....blah blah
[/ QUOTE ]
Hee hee
Yes - very cool idea - except for the fact that VMWare isn't supported by Oracle/JDE in a production environment !
I'm a huge fan of VMWare - in fact, as we speak I'm "backing up" my new 8.12 implementation to VMWare "clones" of the physical hardware (dontcha love VMWare) - just so I have images of my entire configuration "at hand" in case something ever changes. notsodumbthischicken....
The 8.12 setup for the JAS servers - specifically under OAS - is actually very nice - Mr cmanderson has always stated that OAS beats websphere as far as management and ease of use - and I have to agree with him. It was a pretty nice install - and with everything tied up at the database level now, it actually means your web server has a pretty small footprint on the local hard disk. That makes it easy to sit there and make copies for later use.
I also like the "multi-VM" option under OAS - the ability for it to automatically start as many VM's as you want from the standard installation for "round robin" redundancy. nice.
Once I get some free time (ha) - I'll set up a nice VMWare cluster and compare it against a physical cluster as far as performance is concerned. Of course, I'm in the process of buying a mac at the moment - and I have huge hopes that my new mac pro will end up becoming the vmware "demon" machine ! But I digress. Good idea - lets hope that Oracle VM (once they get it running a little better than I tested) can do as you suggest Mr Gregg !
Not to hijack the thread, but I'll give a hypothetical reason to disagree with myself. ...blah blah blah... vm-ware server....blah blah...vm-ware ...blah blah.. Pretty cool idea....blah blah
[/ QUOTE ]
Hee hee
Yes - very cool idea - except for the fact that VMWare isn't supported by Oracle/JDE in a production environment !
I'm a huge fan of VMWare - in fact, as we speak I'm "backing up" my new 8.12 implementation to VMWare "clones" of the physical hardware (dontcha love VMWare) - just so I have images of my entire configuration "at hand" in case something ever changes. notsodumbthischicken....
The 8.12 setup for the JAS servers - specifically under OAS - is actually very nice - Mr cmanderson has always stated that OAS beats websphere as far as management and ease of use - and I have to agree with him. It was a pretty nice install - and with everything tied up at the database level now, it actually means your web server has a pretty small footprint on the local hard disk. That makes it easy to sit there and make copies for later use.
I also like the "multi-VM" option under OAS - the ability for it to automatically start as many VM's as you want from the standard installation for "round robin" redundancy. nice.
Once I get some free time (ha) - I'll set up a nice VMWare cluster and compare it against a physical cluster as far as performance is concerned. Of course, I'm in the process of buying a mac at the moment - and I have huge hopes that my new mac pro will end up becoming the vmware "demon" machine ! But I digress. Good idea - lets hope that Oracle VM (once they get it running a little better than I tested) can do as you suggest Mr Gregg !
pshearer
Active Member
Thanks Jon! (I knew you couldn't stay out of a performance related discussion.) Are you doing 64-bit Citrix? I thought only 32-bit was currently supported. Currently on the 32-bit side I'm getting about 70 concurrent users on a 2x8 configuration (8.10 8.96)
cmanderson
VIP Member
I missed this the first time around. For once someone, agrees with me on something. Nice, thanks.
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