Colo (Colocation) Servers and AutoCAD

[wayne_b]

Hi All,

My first post. I am hoping to find some direction from the forum on the subject.

Our company recently consolidated and relocated their servers to another city. We are a national company and consist of 6 different sites. The IT department have moved all servers to their HQ and I am now faced with a rather pressing issue. I am employed as an AutoCAD administrator and need to create drafting standards so that we will be able to allocate drafting work to which ever site is available. This is a monsterous task in itself. I have to start rolling out CAD customisation files to standardize the CAD interface, make available custom tools, as well as start consolidating all the different libraries of each site into one national library.

Here's the dilemma: I have asked for a central drive to put all the libraries and customisation files and have been told that the preferred solution would be to have all the data dropped into a colo (colocation) server. Has anyone here ever used this solution and if so what is/were the good, the bad and the ugly?

I am reluctant to go down this path as we are trying to stop employees from copying files to their local drives and there is also the issue of AutoCAD not being able to map to a central location for it's customized files.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Regards

Wayne_b

[TravisNave]

Have you considered Vault or the Citrix licensing support options? 

[wayne_b]

With the recent server relocation IT remapped the drives. This in turn rendered our vault unusable. They are currently working on fixing the problem (almost 3 months now). The current licensing method is working fine, I need to create a customised system with tools, a centralised library, centralised cuix files, centralised standard plotters and plotstyles. It's a long road, but will be fun.

I have come across a very informative article from Autodesk university in which this exact issue is addressed.

[jggerth1]

having been in that position in the past, my suggestion is that anything AutoCAD needs to run is best installed locally.  keeping critical elements on a remote server is just going to cause avoidable slowdowns.  especially since your IT department seems to think that a 3 month wait is acceptable..

There are numerous options for keeping local copies in sync with a remote master, from an xcopy on login, to more advanced tricks.

[dgorsman]

Agreed.  Trying to actively run a program like AutoCAD which constantly fetches that information isn't going to work well.  Licensing is OK, but blocks, CUIx, LISP routines, SHX files?  As a compromise I would suggest the central server keep a "master copy" which is pushed out to the local servers on a regular schedule, with the users pointed to their local office servers.

[wayne_b]

Thanks guys. In saying local drives, are you suggesting having local servers on site? For some reason it was decided to keep all server on one site(IT HQ). All the places I worked at had servers on site that linked to a master somewhere else. This was due to the fact that if the communications between the master and slave went down, the office would still be able to function. I have not yet had time to get out to the sites and ask the users whether they were experiencing any problems with this setup.
Although my thoughts are the same as yours(having local servers), I think I'm going to have a hard time selling this to IT. Any pointers I can investigate? Preferably pros and cons of not having local servers on site vs having the servers on site.
Thanks again for the replies.

[jggerth1]

By 'local drive', I'm referring to the installed hard drive of the pc/workstation.  Acad products are not designed to robustly work with support files on a server, whether that server is down the hall or threetime zones away.  That's not to say that a local server is a bad idea, or that it can't be done, just that it's not a use case that autodesk has put a lot of effort into ensuring workability, resiliency, and reliability.    Where the reliability is important, then the best option to to keep everything Autocad needs on the local pc's drive.  And, since you're CAD guys are the ones actually generating billable work, reliability is important to the companie's bottom line.

And there are lots of ways to keep the local files in sync with a master copy of those files.

As far as a remote colo server hosting the sole available copy of something that Acad needs to function -- that'a a very poor idea.  At least, if you care about production getting done.  As dgorsman noted, acad is constantly fetching data and filles -- when that happens on a LAN, it's substantially slower and more problematic than than with local disk drive access.  If that has to happen across a congested WAN link, it's exponentially worse.

Add to that the unpredicatable fragility of a WAN connection, and it's a poor choice (for everyone except the IT group who are trying to minimize their workload).  A single bad backhoe operator 10 miles away could shut down production completely for a day or a week. 

[pendean]

It seems your I.T. is not planning for any disaster solutions: with all your files remotely located, the "out of your control" disconnect to your files for whatever reason means your entire office's CAD users (and presumably any computer user in your office) will be sitting on their hands for a day, or week.

Can your company afford to pay staff for sitting on their hands? Are your bosses, not I.T., aware that is what you currently have for a set up? paying staff for doing nothing when a disconnect happens to your remote servers?

Things to consider.

[dgorsman]

Whaaa...?!?  I've run AutoCAD with most of the support files on a local server for a very, very long time with negligible issues.  Its not completely redundant/bombproof but saying its not robust is a definite stretch.  Speedwise the difference between a local server and local PC is negligible - I've moved files from one to the other with nobody noticing.  I've also found that even if you put all AutoCAD files on the users PC, if the server goes down you are still not going to get any work done due to everything else being available (CAD or otherwise), least of all the drawings themselves.

[jggerth1]

I'm certainly not saying that keeping support files on the server is impossible, because it's not at all.  Heck, it's not necessarily even impractical.  But I can't call autodesk's handling  of remote LAN stored support files exactly robust.  There's just been too many issues over the years -- from  UNC name issues, to DFS issues, to Netware failures, for the term 'robust' to be a good description.  Maybe 2012 has fixed everything, I don't know because the office hasn't switched and at home my lan is server-limited, (ubuntu & samba on an old dell wkstn) so not a good test.

AFAICT - Acad tries to treat non-local stuff as though it were in fact local, just slower.  And as long as your network infrastructure is robust, (running gigabit ethernet, fast switches, fast servers, no bozo streaming youtube or talkradio) you should not expect to see significant problems.  But there doesn't seem to be much in the way of 'smarts' when Acad is trying to access resources.  If the network path hasfailed, Acad just keeps on trying until it times out.  and the next time in that session, blindly tries again.  At least, that's how I'm interpreting the processmonitor logs that show acad keep looking for files on a missing drive,  over and over.

While i've got a gigabit port on my motherboard at work, and the server here is brand spaking new, the switches in the closet are 100mbit,  so that's my speed limit here.  And keeping all the support files local does work better in my locale. YMMV of course.

[wayne_b]

Thank you very much for you advice. This is exactly what I was hoping to get from the question. I atleast now have an idea of what teething problems awaits me ahead. To give you an idea, I'm a single autocad administrator, handling all troubleshooting, helpdesk duties, Cad system administration and training by myself for about 100 autocad licenses. The shear size of the project ahead is daunting, but I welcome the challenge and by receiving this type of feedback from the cad community makes things a little easier. You guys draw my attention to things that I might have missed by sharing your own experiences. THANKS!!! I hope I'll be able to return the favour someday!!!
Keep the comments coming. They're insightful!

[cordination]

My tip is to look into using Windows DFS (Distributed File Server) system. It synchronizes files across multiple servers that can be located in different office locations. It worked very well in a large company I worked for. IT set it up so I cannot tell any details how it was configured. I was very, very satisfied with the performance. IT buy-in and setup req'd. Hope you can talk them into it.

There is other synchronization software out there. DFS's drawback is that it doesn't lock other people out if you have a file open in location A. With central standards I assume you want everyone except you having read-only access anyhow, so this limitation works actually Ok for you.

Typically you want to have the standard resources (enterprise cui, startup lisp, content, blocks, templates, etc) central = on a network drive. It should be a local server, and not come from thousand of miles away. Coming via WAN is too slow unless your company pays for super-connectivity. With many resources coming from the network, it makes sense to check how large these files are. An enterprise CUI should be small, because most cui settings can come from a local user cui. Similarly, check from where the tool palettes are loaded, so there's a nice balance between central settings and speed. Network-based shx can be another drag on your AutoCAD.