Problem during windchill cluster installation

[KGH]

Hi,

I'm unable to proceed with windchill cluster installation. I have 3 hosts. One master and 2 for slaves. Attached is the options to be completed while installing.

Please help on what to be keyin in the attached document fiels. Please suggest on the one I configured is correct or not.

[hlinseisen]

We had set up manually a clustered environment with Windchill 8 in the past and went back to a single server instance with PDMLink 10 on a vmware image because this is easier to administer and maintain. Also the power of up to date servers seem to be sufficient to serve thousand users.

Therefore i am interested to ask why you are setting up windchill as a cluster.

[KGH]

We have multiple sites spreaded across many locations. So looking to build windchill environment as PTC designed with master and slaves. We have 3 servers, one can be made master with database and vault and other two can act as slaves.

Here, we can define background method servers and can do load balancing as well between the slaves.

[hlinseisen]

From my side i would say setup a single server with a lot of RAM ( min 48 GB ) and min a Quad Core with 64bit operating system and put the Database on the second System. ( We have our system that serves about 1000 users as a vmware machine with 6 cores and 64 GB Ram -- which are a little bit oversized 🙂 )

Setting up a cluster also means that you allways have to care about multiple servers while doing os updates, updates on your system and so on.

You can also have a backgroundmethod server in a single server instance and also start multiple foreground methodservers.

If you configure the mod_jk status page you can even put a single methodserver out of duty in order to restart it without disturbing the current users.

As far as i have seen over the past years load balancing between multiple physical Servers wasn't really needed as the performance bottleneck in Windchill allways was the database but never the cpu / the methodservers.

The Methodservers will only cause problems if one programs an infinite loop and CPU goes up to 100% because of this bug.

Read this regarding performance:

http://communities.ptc.com/blogs/WindchillPerf/2013/12/20/my-presentation-to-partners-on-windchill-performance