Topic: Max number of users on one server?

[Martijn]

I want to implement SME 6. But I dont know what the limitations are of SME 6
What is the max number of users if the server is used as PDC/Mail/Print/Firewall server!

[Dan Brown]

There is no hard maximum.  Obviously your hardware will play a major role, though--if you're planning on hosting 10k users on a P90 with 32 MB of RAM, you might have some problems...

[Martijn]

I talk of a modern server, P4 2 Ghz, 512 or 1Gb Ram....

How many users is possible... everything must be run smoothly!

200, 300, 50??? I've no idea.... Anyone?

[Boris]

It probably depends on applications and the way it used. For the web server it could be thousands simultaneous connections. Same for the mail server.  As a firewall, server of this speed can likely give you 50-100Mb throughput including a dozen of encrypted (VPN) connections.
For the fileserver (regular office mix of files) on the fast SCSI RAID few hundred users should be OK.
Single (badly written) application can bring it down to crawl.

[Ray Mitchell]

Refer to the handbook, it gives some pretty good ideas about user & hardware requirements

http://edocs.mitel.com/

The hardware recommendations below apply to servers with up to 500 users. The 6000 MAS can support more than 500 users, but in such cases we suggest that you specify a custom system using our Category 4 requirements as the minimum starting point.
 

2.1.4. Hardware Requirements for a Category 4 Server
Table 2.7. Definition of a Category 4 Server

# of Users Up to 500
Usage Heavy

Table 2.8. Hardware Requirements of a Category 4 Server

Architecture PCI-based Pentium-class processor  
Processor speed 700 MHz (or better)
Minimum RAM 256 MB
Hard drive SCSI - at least 20 GB (2 large SCSI drives using RAID1 strongly recommended)
SCSI adapter Refer to SCSI Adapter section below (only necessary for SCSI systems).  
Ethernet adapters  Refer to Ethernet adapter section below.  
Modem (for dialup only) Only modems that are Linux-compatible may be used. WinModems are not supported.
CD-ROM drive ATAPI or SCSI
Floppy drive any
Monitor any
Graphics card any
Mouse none required
Sound card none required


Regs
Ray

[Martijn]

Thanks folks...

This is what i wanted to know.... I never trust the manual, production experiens is much better....!

kind regards

[Mats Karlsson]

As mentioned earlier its many dependencies and usage patterns in the process of an server specification.

One thing you should keep in mind is to track the performance of the box with for ex. sysmon (rrdtool/mrtg), so you can see/predict when it's time for upgrade/downgrade.

And keep an log on the server when software/hardware/network is updated so you can correlate those data with the performance data.


/Mats

[Tom Haynes]

We are a laptop school, and an e-smith 5.6 machine is the file server for student user directories and network storage. We serve up home pages for them from their user directories and they do student projects that are webpage based. Kids being kids, the server sees hard use, and they have drives mapped every time they authenticate via Novell.

We have almost 1000 users online at one time at peak. The machine is running e-smith 5.6. It is a dual processor 900 PIII with scsi and 2 gig of ram.

This is plenty of server for what we are doing. If you use squid you may need to increase the number of file descriptors if it bogs down, but that only happened to us at certain times of the day when _everyone_ was surfing.

For some reason, the quotas have gotten corrupted  with all these users so we reassign them via a cron job every night using the Lazy Admin's Toolkit.

This machine has been stable as a rock.

[%sig%]

[John]

Martijn,

We have setup a serveral SME 5.6 box for a school project's but one is for us the this one with ± 1800 user account's on a Pent III 900 Mhz XEON Dell Poweredge whith 1,5 Gb mem and a Harware SCSI RAID controller.

We only use here webmail, proxy, basic firewalling, routing and provide webspace to all of the user's. con-current user online at peak time's ± 500. They can also use their e-mail account's at home to send en recieve mail.

Stabilitie a dutch term "Draait als een trein" on english "Drive like a train"

Whith regards

Johan