Vault replication and licensing types- how to choose?

[Anonymous]

Good morning! We're running a single Vault 2012 Professional server which we're upgrading to 2013 this week.  Shortly after, we're considering placing servers at three sites to allow external users better performance. All external users currently use Vault by connecting via VPN to the server which works, but can be quite slow.

Our two main questions are: 

1) When deciding between full/partial replication to improve user performance, what thresholds do you consider?

- One Job site connects over 4G, another over DSL, and a third if across the ocean.

2) How does licensing work with this?  I've read up on the three types of licensing (single server, redundant, and distributed), but I'm not entirely certain how the clients point to one server for its data, and another for licenses, and how performance might be impacted if the license server was kept remote while the data server was placed locally.

Thanks for any insight you might be able to offer, I'm finding it to be a challenge to pull all of this information together on how these two halves of the product mesh.

[olearya · Accepted solution]

Hi There,

The decision around full / partial replication comes down to a couple of factors 1. Is the connection reliable, ie do you lose connection regularly between sites - in this case full replication is preferred as you can work for up to 14 days disconnected from the main site without rebuilding the environment. 2. The second one is latency, @100ms latency we would suggest partial replication will be difficult as there is too much of a delay when users are executing a command.  

This figure does vary of course in terms of a tipping point, its really just based on the expectation of users at the remote site and productivity.  You can test latency between sites by simply measuring the ping response over a 24 hour period or so.   Obviously partial replication is the simpler, cheaper option but it needs to work well.

Licensing should not be an issue if you are all in the same country - each ADMS server points users to a license server which could be the same machine or somewhere else.

This means that each server (site) could have its own pool of licenses or each server could direct all your users to get their licenses from the main site.  In this case there should be no performance concerns, you just need a reliable link between sites.

The different licensing models can be used but they are not essential, they are designed to provide redundancy and fail over access to licenses which you may or may not need.