More from the Server Farm

Moving some companies to single company servers

We have been making major changes in the ActiveApplications Hosted Servers for the past few weeks. Several new methods of connection have been tested over that time. Even though the servers do not look like they are busy, the speed of ActiveApplications has not been what we wanted.

What are the issues?

We resolved some of the issues with Windows 2019 but it still performs worse than Windows Server 2012. See the related post on that topic.

We suspect the issue is network speed and have come up with a method to isolate single companies on a server and eliminate the network connection between AA, ULAs, SQL, RDP and Active Directory servers. This method is far less expandable and has limits but it appears to provide a speed and hence reliability boost. We have moved a few companies with good results. Over the next few months this new method will be applied to more companies. If all goes well we may be moving your company or the speed may go back up as other companies are moved.

There are some issues with this method. One issue is that it is more expensive to license software. We will see how we can mitigate the expense over the next few months.

Another issue is that support and maintenance on the isolated servers requires more time and resources. A program update now must be passed to another domain. That domain change creates more security issues during the update process. We will see what can be done to reduce the problems over the next few months.

That brings you up to date on the server status. Please provide your comments.

What is being done?

Resolving the issues by this method increases the cost of providing a remote desktop but the speed and reliability issues may outweigh the alternative.

One of the advantages is that we are able to make changes to a company without affecting others. This is the other side of the coin about applying updates to a company. The updates will take more time consuming to apply and they will be more difficult to implement but they will be easier to keep from affecting other systems.

Another big advantage is that if there is an issue it will be easier to isolate and debug because server log errors will only apply to one company. Reading the server logs will be easier.

That is the same for potential malware exposure. If a user does something to expose their login to malware, it only has potential to infect one company. It is already isolated.

This method is similar to the methods used by AWS in building massive but isolated networks. Their solution is to bring up a bigger and faster server as the usage goes up. I don’t know if that applies to us at our size.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *