Dynamics Navision for more than 300 users ?

dafman

Hello .

First of all, this forum is really a fantastic knowledge base !

I read many articles about this subject but .... for me the following thing is not clear . I would like to know if it is possible to work with more than 300 concurrent users on the same database.

We have a project to install Navision in 2 countries on the same server.

We estimate in the first time the number of named users to 450 ( approx 250 concurrent users ) .

In the future, we hope to install NAV in others countries ( USA, Russia, UK , ... )

We are unable to find in Belgium or in France a customer which is in the same case .... Many people around us tell : " Forget NAV , it's impossible to work with more than 200 users ! ) [-X

I read in the forum than a "fine tuning" of SQL and a optimalized hardware configuration " are required to work with a lot of sim users !

What do you mean by this ? :?:

Pratically, the problem of table locks are also a problem for the other ERP ... What is the difference with NAV ?

Thanks in advance for your help .

DenSter

It really depends on how your system will be used, if you have many add-on products, what those products are, how they are used, what your set up is. Too many variables to have a clear answer to your question.

However, there are many NAV implementations with more than 200 users. They usually come with some extent of performance tqeaking, but there are many successful implementations with that many users.

Marije_Brummel

Yes, there are installations with the number of users you require but you'll need a huge budget for hardware and performance tuning. And with hardware you are talking about very expensive blade servers.

Locking should not be an issue but transaction serialisation will. ERP systems require especialy G/L transactions to run one at a time to ensure a healthy system.

If Navision is your choice then you will have a higly customisable ERP suite which will fit you like a glove.

jlandeen

I agree with all of the comments thus far but would just like to add one word of caution. Navision is definately highly customizable and it can be modified to suit many business requirements out there - however it is important that you really consider how many customizations are made to navision and how they affect those serialized transactions.

I've worked on a few large implementations that encountered problems when Navision was "over customized" to try and meet every silly user demand. As long as an experience Navision partner is managing the implementation and care is given to the severity and location of modifications to base Navision, a 300 user installation should be quite feasible.

David_Singleton

Firstly like to just agree with all the above comments, and also like to emphasis what jlandeen said.

Bad customizations, or the wrong customizations are going to be your biggest enemy. Things like automating dimensions, or pop up warnings, automatic processes and fields that tell you everything all th time are going to kill the system. Keep control of the mods, and make sure they really are necessary. And of course design all mods knowing that this is a big SQL system. Think carefully about every time you use SIFT and why you are doing it that way.

Keep in mind also that in SQL, Navision puts each company's data in seperte tables, so this means that locking in one company does not affect locking in another, so in fact you may be able to look at this as a number of smaller systems not one huge one. Of course there is the option of multiple databases, but I think with good SQL management and the services of a good SQL expert, you can manage it in one system.

In terms of Hardware, take a look at NetApp RAID 4 DP arrays those boxes fly on Navision SQL. So long as you have the budget of course, since they are not cheap.

Marije_Brummel

I always thought that NETAPP recommends RAID6 because of double safety.

RAID 4 writes all checks to one disk instead of speading them over all disks like RAID5. NETAPP claims to have some clever memory layer that avoids the waittime for the parity calculation that normaly affects your performance.

Sunset

Mark Brummel wrote:

I always thought that NETAPP recommends RAID6 because of double safety.

RAID 4 writes all checks to one disk instead of speading them over all disks like RAID5. NETAPP claims to have some clever memory layer that avoids the waittime for the parity calculation that normaly affects your performance.

Has RAID5 become totally safe? There was some issues about RAID5 suddenly crashing with checksum errors, and the only way out was with new discs and a restore of a preveous backup. Will hurry to say that I haven't heard or seen this proplem in a while, but neither have I heard that the problem has been fixed.

Marije_Brummel

I do NOT reccoment RAID5, we are discussing NetApp here, which is an advanced storage system not to be compared with Direct Attached Raid systems like 99,9% of the NAV users use.

Use RAID1 for the Log and Raid 10 for Data, nothing else.

Sunset

Was just curious. Should have remarked that it was a sidetracking question. My bad. :^o

I realize that NetApp was the discussion, but as you mentioned RAID5 it got me wondering. But perhaps the question would have been better suited in a seperate thread. ](*,)

P.S. I always use RAID10

Marije_Brummel

No problem, I just do not want anyone reading this thread thinking RAID5 is ok to use.

I read a presentation by a Microsoft evangelist last week recomending RAID5 for a 26 user system which almost made my cry. 8-[

dafman

Thanks very much for your replies !

The only add-on that we will plan is NAVIONE from GESWAY .

For our hardawre we forseen to have :

* 3 servers IBM for TSE with the following configuration

=> 1 Proc Xeon Dualcore 5160 3 GHZ - 16 Go ram 2 harddisk 73 Go SAS 15RPM


* 1 server IBM SQL x 3650 with the following configuration :

=> 2 proc Xeon Quad Core 5355 2,66 Ghz 14 Go Ram 2 harddisk 73 Go SAS 15RPM

* for the storage : IBM system storage DS 3200 with 12 harddisk 73 Go SAS 15RPM


What are your specif recommandations ?

What do you mean by " specif budget to customize SQL " ?

To convince in my company, I need to have some references from big companies which have NAV ... Could you help me ?

Thanks in advance for your help .

Marije_Brummel

I am affraid this will not do, there is a great doc about hardware, but that is missing one element, transactions.

It has a twodimensional matrix with GB and USERS. IMHO the number of transactions is the 3rd dimension which everyone forgets.

Try to convince your NAV partner to invite a performance specialist into the project team.

Out of the box, NAV is tuned for the general end user and you are certainly not one of those :-s

Good luck.

jlandeen

As far as actual reference sites go I would think that it would be best to try and find out from Microsoft themselves. They issue the licenses so I'm sure they know who the biggest installations are

Marije_Brummel

I forgot to mention that SQL2005 64 bit is recomended for NAV installations.

themave

dafman wrote:

.....

* 3 servers IBM for TSE with the following configuration

=> 1 Proc Xeon Dualcore 5160 3 GHZ - 16 Go ram 2 harddisk 73 Go SAS 15RPM

....

for the terminal servers you should have more then two disk, the I would recommend two mirrior disk for the operating system and a single disk for the windows swap file. The swap file should be on a separate disk then the remaining operating system in a terminal server environment.

boby

Hello,
there are very big users of Navision system in this forum (1000+ users)..
Read here http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=91623#91623
or http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19604
Maybe you can contact them via PM?

dafman

Thanks a lot for your help .

Yourposts will be very useful...

Best regards....