Most Efficient Way to Connect GP Across Countries

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Posted on by K Day

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I was wondering if any of you had some insight into the quickest way to have users access GP 10 from China where the SQL Server is located in the US. Currently there are a few users using Remote Desktop into a Terminal Server that is located in the US. Howver, they claim that it is really slow. There has been a suggestion that the client / server configuration should work faster. The argument is that the screen refreshed and keystrokes are the only thing being sent on a remote desktop session but one DBA has said that it should be quicker if they just had the clients installed. However, this company did a move down the street and had the SQL server at the old location for a few weeks and the clients were so slow that they were almost unusable. That's just down the street, not across the ocean.

I have no idea on this one, but I'm sure that one of you knows about this. Just another note, Citrix is not an option due to the cost. During discussions, they indicated that they pay quite a bit to have a connection between the two offices (US and China), I don't know the speed though.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Kevin

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Dencio 2,172 on at

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Hi Kevin,

This type of deployment really calls for thin-client solutions in this case RDP, preferably ICA (citrix). Let's concentrate on RDP, the following should be controlled:

Dedicated bandwidth for TS session on the Terminal Server.

A discipline on bandwidth usage on the end-user when connected via TS.

Sorry about your DBA, but he's wrong. Client/Server deployment with this distance is not even worth testing.

Note the following parameters affecting thin-client performance:

How many remote users will be in China?

Do you have a dedicated Terminal Server for GP? Multiple network cards?

How about other applications using the same bandwidth?

Memory will be dependent on the number of users per TS machine.

This will give you a good capacity planning.

Cheers,

Dencio

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Frank Hamelly | MVP... 46,625 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Dencio is correct. RDP is the way to go in this instance. Client/server would be agonizingly slow. In fact, in the perfect world, I would always have all users connect either via RDP or Citrix. That way you only have to maintain one Reports and one Forms dictionary and not have to worry about shared directories.

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I'd like to add that another advantage in using RDP is that it eases support tasks such as upgrades and general troubleshooting, because the application is housed in one server and is reachable remotely. This advantage applies even in networks with relatively close proximity.

Some may argue that this would lead to slow performance due to multiple sessions being hosted on one server. But hardware technology has vastly improved these past few years that it is not uncommon to have an 8-core configuration server that easily handles 64 concurrent sessions.

So bottomline is stick with RDP as moving to C/S will only make it worse, and try to look into other factors that are causing the slowdown.

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Frank Hamelly | MVP... 46,625 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Excellent points Ruel. I have a client that runs in excess of 100 concurrent sessions over Citrix. No performance issues at all.

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K Day 7,365 on at

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Thanks everyone, this is very helpful. Since RDP seems to be our best option at this point, is there a way to make sure the speed is optimized? For example, if it is sending screen refreshes, a lower resolution setting might be quicker? I imagine less pixels means less data sent?

Kevin

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It basically boils down to cutting out as much as you can.

For settings on the client RDP you can try the following:

On the Display tab:

1) Try to reduce the colors to as low as the users can acommodate. I've some clients that go extreme all the way down to 256.

2) Strike a balance with the resolution. Too small may mean no real estate to do the work you wanted to do in the first place.

On the Experience tab:

1) Choose a connection that is slightly lower than your actual connection, or go as low as you can go without stuttering issues.

2) Unmark everything except for Bitmap Caching.

On the Local Resources:

1) You probably don't need sound so set it to 'Do not play'

2) Unmark Printers and Clipboard if you don't need them.

For the target server, from my experience the default wallpaper literally kills the connection. So disable all wallpapers on the default user and all users.

Hope that helps.

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Also, how do you manage printing from GP? Where are the reports being printed? I am asking because print packets also add substantial traffic when sent over the network. In that case you may want to look into using packet compression software such as Thinprint.

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Hi all, bit late to the discussion but I'll add my two cents worth anyway!. I have a client with the server physically in Ireland. V8 dynamics GP users log in from China, India and the US over Remote Desktop. Printing is done to local printers.

No performance issues except one case where spooler lines were being added to the dex.ini on the terminal server (never really got to the bottom of this...but when a large number of these lines get added...performance (especially refreshing enquriy windows) seriously suffers - deleting these lines from the dex.ini resolves the issue).

They recently set up new terminal servers - one for each region as they approached the maximum users on each box.

The remote desktop solution is a dream from the point of view of support / applying service packs / maintaining reports and forms dictionaries / upgrades etc...also great for remote support.

Best regards,

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K Day 7,365 on at

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Thanks everyone, this was very helpful.

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MG-16101311-0 26,225 on at

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A bit late, but here is my contribution:

If you have a large number of users you should consider using load balancing with Terminal Server or Citrix. In a load balancing scenario you will have 5 or 6 servers (they can all be on one physical server if you use VM ESX or Hyper-V) being orchestrated by a load balancing service that distributes connections to each of the servers. If using Citrix, I would look into adding XenApp, rather than the typical ICA client. XenApp allows you to virtualize GP.

I have a client who is successfully using XenApp with GP in a very complex environment with 6 load balanced Citrix servers, all running on 1 VM ESX Server, very powerful server I may add.

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