Best hardware specifications for NAV Server

engsiong75

Hi everyone

I would like to know the opinion of fellow NAV consultants on the specification for the NAV Server (NAV Service Tier)
1) We are planning to deploy a 32GB RAM with Xeon 2.66GHz Quad Core E5430. Does anyone use anything more powerful?
2) Is there any way to add another server to the configuration to speed it up or the only solution is to keep upgrading the server?

The issue is the customer wants to have little lag time in the program so they want to have a fairly high end server. There are 50+ users and they need to use it intensively for about 3 hours everyday. The users cannot afford to lose to spend time waiting for the program to either update data or print.

I do not have an issue database server as their own IT people who are quite experience with the SQL Server.

Thank you,

bbrown

What version are we talking about here? Also how many users are you expecting?

1) Unless you have a very large number of users, I would consider this server to be somewhat oversized. A larger server would not gain you anything as it would unlikely be the bottleneck. Microsoft has run benchmarks (NAV 2013 R2) with 500 users on a 4 core server with less memory. They are recommending around 125 users per core. I tend to be a bit more conservative and spec around 50 - 75 users per core. With NAV 2009 being 16 bit, the extra RAM just helps hold the server down. Unless you plan to run many services.

2) In any version, you can always run multiple services to spread the load. With the 64 bit versions, recommendation is 1 service per Windows server. Also with the 64 bit versions, you can run load-balancing to present all services as a single connection to the users. In this situation, there is not dynamic load balancing.

The quality of any code (standard and custom) along with the SQL Server are likely going to have a larger impact on the system.

Don't make assumptions on the SQL Server, just because the client as IT people with "experience". Review and verify it is adequate for your needs.

davmac1

I agree with bbrown.
I think you are for more likely to have code and SQL Server tuning issues - especially if these active users are accessing the same part of NAV, like sales orders for example.
You can look at the new built-in features for queue processing for sales and purchase order posting.
Make sure the SQL Server is optimized for a transaction processing environment. Be prepared to tune the database.

engsiong75

Hi

>>What version are we talking about here?
NAV 2015. We also expect to upgrade it using the same hardware to NAV 2016 and any other future version at least for the next 3 years.

>>Also how many users are you expecting?
50+ users.

>>Microsoft has run benchmarks (NAV 2013 R2) with 500 users on a 4 core server with less memory.
Do you know where I might read up about them? Any links? All I could find was the old information related to NAV 2009 performance guide.

>>2) In any version, you can always run multiple services to spread the load.
Thanks. Would this mean that I have to stop all the services in the different servers when I upload objects or changes?

Thanks

engsiong75

Found the link for the NAV 2013R2 sizing guide which I assume should also work for NAV 2013.

https://mbs.microsoft.com/Files/partner ... elines.pdf