What Is The Best Way to Handle Multi-Site Environment?
Version: 7.x & up
Q - We are starting out outgrow the solution we put in place for the Texas warehouse to access the software. We currently have Virtual Machines hosted on the server for each user, but we can only deploy a couple more before the server capacity will be exceeded, so I wanted to reach out to you to see what your other customers do for multi-site configurations. Ideas we have come up with, but do not know if the software is compatible:
- Convert to an RDS environment, which should allow many more users to connect to the server with a much lower overhead than dedicated VM's.
- Utilize RemoteApp in an RDS environment on the server. This would be nice to prevent the users from having to RDP into anything, as we could run the software "natively" from their PC's. This would also further reduce the server overhead.
- We considered leveraging Azure infrastructure to host the software in the cloud... Perhaps an AVD, RemoteApp, or other type of setup.
- Another option we considered is moving the server to TX and migrating the current office to use it remotely since the major growth seems to be in TX currently. This option is more a question for upper management, and the software wouldn't really change a whole lot in this scenario.
- We don't know how your software behaves in RDS/RemoteApp environments, and we've had issues with Quickbooks and Sage in these configurations, so I wanted to float this by you before going any deeper. If there is another configuration that your customers use, please let me know.
A - We suggest to go with RDS. It works very well and we
fully support it. In our own in-house environment, we hosted all of our
RDS & database servers in the AWS environment. All our staffs work in
the remote desktop on the RDS servers in AWS cloud. This includes their Office
365 applications. So the remote desktop is each users’ desktop and they
don’t have much locally. I personally only use local desktop with
streaming applications like Zoom or YouTube. YouTube probably is not an issue
since their employees is not likely to use it in their office environment.
Many of our users are using RDS and we know this will work out well for
GForce.
As for RemoteApp, we tried it before, I found there’s some performance issue with startup time and that environment does not work as well for us.
As for where the servers should reside, may I suggest putting their servers in the cloud (like AWS or Azure per your suggestion). This way, it is irrelevant which location will be your main operations in the future.
EMK