Client Management Suite

Hello,

I am reviewing the Planning & Implementation Guide, but I'm having a hard time matching our environment to the examples.

We have 68 locations (67 remote sites + 1 corporate site).  There are about 500 clients at the corporate site, and about 160 clients at each remote site.  This gives us a total of about 11,000 managed clients.

We are also growing, and assuming to add 6 more remote sites each year, with 160 clients each.

I am assuming that I should follow the "Large Enterprise" model, however they show multiple "NS" boxes.  What I was picturing was 1 "NS" at our corporate office, 1 site server at corporate office, and a site server at each remote location.

Am I approaching this wrong, or do you forsee me running in to any issues?  Would my hardware requirements reamain the same for the "NS" box, requiring (8 Cores, 8GB RAM - NS) and (8 Cores, 16GB RAM - SQL)

Thank you for your help!

-Jason

In 7.1, your NS will be 64-bit so your RAM limit is no longer 4GB.  You'll want to have plenty of RAM if you stick with a single NS in your design.  You are correct that you will have a site server at every remote office and at your corporate office to handle your corporate users.  You'll want to tweak things like agent check-ins and task intervals for performance reasons.

Will you be slamming your NS with resource-intensive SQL queries/reports, or will other administrators not as bright as you be slamming the NS with reports?  If so, consider having an additional NS as a reporting server.  The reporting burden is no longer on your only NS if you do this.

If you have staff at the remote sites, you could also ask them to use the replicated NS ("reporting server") for all of their console tasks.  Console uses server RAM per session, and 67 sessions would add up to around 1.5GB.  Plus you've got to plan for the growth you mentioned.

Someone like KSchroeder may be better able to comment on multi-site design and the benefits of having multiple NS's.  I only manage a corporate site with six remote sites.

Does this help?

Ok, I'm not Kyle, but it'll have to do. If you wait until 7.1 gets released, unless you absolutely need a second server for political\business unit concern, 1 server will be fine.

The number one thing you need to scope out is the future, meaning don't plan for now, or even six months to a year from now (now being the date of install). If you are constantly expanding, I would even consider having the SQL database off box, stuffed full of RAM and fast disk, which will buy you a longer lifetime with your single NS.

Needless to say, put a site server everywhere possible, including at the NS location. (That may be debateable, but if you can offload a bunch of work from the NS for cheap, why not?) You can always designate an existing server as a site server, so the cost of owernship doesn't have to be astronomical.