Hello,
I am managing a CAD server for an office with about 80 CAD users. We are running into usage behavior that has us somewhat puzzeled.
In a nutshell: The network traffic we are seeing on the server is unusual. Rather than see the peaks and valleys from a "normal" file server, we see high sustained traffic to the server, non stop. Attached are two network usage graphs from the server to help illustrate.
setup: server is a virtual machine on a blade system. Blade is 8x processor with 64 gigs of ram. virtual machine has 8gigs of ram and a 800gig data partition holding the actual cad data. Data is stored on SAN all RAID 5. Server is only a file server, nothing else on it, running Windows 2008 r2
server is vlaned from the users, with a dedicate full 1gig path.
we are running 2009 with a few 2011 users on a mix of Win7 and WinXP, both 32 and 64bit. No Revit
Any ideas?
if your CAD data is saved on and worked on directly from the server isn't this expected behaviour? the users would be constantly writting to the server as they open, work, save and load data...
I would agree. Working across the LAN is not the most efficient method. You might consider implementing Autodesk Vault so that your users can work locally, but the database of drawings are still kept safely on your SAN.
Uhm. using Vault or any other EDMS for that matter, is unlikely to reduce network traffic, and would add its own overhead. AutoCAD's current approach is actually pretty efficient for working across a LAN. The active drawing, and any xref are copied down locally as temp files, so the network traffic is generally due to opening and saving, which happens a lot less often than editing.
True, but you'd limit the saving and opening to being local instead of constantly over the network. The network traffic would consist of only checking in and checking out.
Have you run any network tracing tools (Network Monitor, Wireshark, etc) to determine which machine(s) and processes are pushing the traffic? It's very possible that some other program is cuasing the issue (streaming video, a virus, etc.).
It's impossible to tell the culprit just by viewing that graph and determining that the network is busy.
Hi,
you may check this article and see if it reflects your issue?
Network performance issue when using SMB Ver. 2