NAV Team: Hosting Possibilities for Dynamics NAV 2009 R2

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With the release of Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 we have spent some time trying to understand the issues related to hosting the product. Based on these discussions we have added some things to the R2 release and will be adding things to the next release as well to accommodate hosting of NAV even further. The features we have added related to hosting the product are:

• The ability to show a login dialog box upon opening the RoleTailored client
• The ability to add a server-side certificate and thereby enable SSL/TLS
• Last but not least we have put some effort into documenting how to configure the product to run over a Wide Area Network (WAN) and the performance and scalability implications of doing so

To begin with let us have a look at the environment we are adding to the mix with these features.



In current releases this would be possible by adding a VPN connection to the mix with the performance overhead and administrative cost that it adds.

To mitigate a possible man in the middle attack we have added the ability to add a certificate on the server side of the setup. This helps ensure that the server to which the client is connecting is actually the one that it should be connecting to.

As most hosting scenarios require any client to login to a domain that is run by the hosting company we have added the ability to show a login dialog when opening the RoleTailored client to allow a user of NAV to easily provide those credentials to the remote site in a secure fashion. This happens over an encrypted channel to the SSL-verified server in the other end.

After the connection is established the communication between the RoleTailored client and the server is also encrypted to ensure that if someone is listening in on the communication it would be garbled while being transmitted over the internet.

The natural question to ask is then "what does this mean in terms of performance?" We have spent quite a while looking into that to be able to come up with some guidelines about which requirements should be put upon the network connectivity between the hosting site and the customer site.

We have focused our tests around two factors - latency and bandwidth. The way we have tested this is in a simulated environment where we were able to throttle both bandwidth and latency to be able to simulate different types of connectivity. The tests we performed were 10 concurrent users posting 10 one-line sales orders in an automated fashion through the User Interface of the RoleTailored client. An important note here is that this type of measurement is not entirely realistic as the actual entering of the Sales Orders are fast to the point that the UI doesn't render before the Post button is pressed. This also means that if this is the "benchmark load" any real life load with similar operations will be slower.

We tested bandwidths ranging from a 10/1 mbit line up to a 300/300 mbit line which would be somewhat similar to a LAN. Bandwidths are setup so a 10/1 line would be 10 mbit download speed to the client site and 1 mbit upload speed from the client site.

Latencies were tested between 0 ms to 600 ms, which is ranging between a fast LAN connection to a slow ADSL connection or even a fast satellite connection, which would be between 500-1000 ms.

The graph below shows the response times as the red line, the maximum kilobytes received per second as well as the average kilobytes received per second, the maximum kilobytes sent per second and the average kilobytes sent per second.

The x-axis signifies the round-trip time added to the connection in milliseconds.



Looking at the graph it shows that latency linearly impacts the response time for obvious reasons. It also shows that a higher latency impacts the ability to utilize the available bandwidth and that the sweet spot/elbow is between a latency of 100ms and 150ms.

The graph for the bandwidth scenario is somewhat less complicated. It shows the bandwidth per user on the x-axis and the response time for the 10 sales orders on the y-axis. Note that the bandwidth per user means that 5/1 is equivalent to a 50/10 mbit connection. 2/0,5 is a 20/5 mbit connection.



The graph shows that the elbow is somewhere between 1,5/0,3 mbit per user or a 15/3 mbit line and 2/0,1 mbit per user or a 20/1 mbit line. Additional studies also show that the determining factor for these connections are the upload speed rather than the download speed and that the elbow is between 0,1 and 0,3 mbit per user for the tested scenarios.

As this is targeted towards limited bandwidth scenarios it is worth noting that for any type of connection it will be possible for a single session to use it all if transferring a large file or even running a large report.

Together with this release we will provide documentation to help configure the network infrastructure that is needed for the RoleTailored client to be able to communicate with the NAV Server over the WAN.

Recently Microsoft hosted a Hot Topic Session called "Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 Hot Topic: RoleTailored Client for remote and roaming users". A recorded version of the session can be seen at the Parther Learning Center.

- Claus Busk Andersen



Источник: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Micro...v-2009-r2.aspx