Replication Server Sizing

[BrianToussaint]

Okay, I can't find anything in the massive amounts of reference documentation that make suggestions for sizing a replicated server.  I know that disk space and speed are going to be important, but how about CPU and memory?  We are looking at setting up a replicated server at our other location and I'm in the server sizing and if we will be able to do any acceleration or not.  The lower the cost for the server, the better chance of possibly getting WAN Acceleration of some sort.  The other site has about 30 Windchill users and will have CREO users on and off.  We are on Windchill 10.2 with plans to go to Windchill 11 next year.  We are dealing with about 500 GB of data in our file vaults and add 200-800 MB a day.

[TomU]

I would need to do some real time monitoring to be sure, but from what I can tell there is almost zero workload on the remote file servers.  The one remote server we currently have is ancient (~2007, 4 GB RAM), yet it works just fine.  The issues we do have are all related to WAN speed.  I would suggest you put your money into WAN acceleration.

[ChrisSpartz]

The Windchill Hardware Sizing Guide contains a section at near the end titled "Sizing a Windchill File Server", which gives recommendations for replication servers. The recommendation for 10.2 is 2 CPU cores and 8GB of memory.

Though, like Tom said, replication servers do very little processing. All user requests are still handled by the master site. When a user performs an upload/download, the master site first figures out which site should be used and redirects the upload/download to that site. The replication site then only handles the actual transfer of the file, which doesn't require much processing power or memory.