Synchronizing Revit Central Models between Offices over Internet-VPN

[mohammad.badranHYA7R]

hello Revit community,

This post/query is addressed to IT Infra/System engineers mainly supporting Autodesk Revit apps.

Our company is a multi-discipline engineering consultancy firm. We have thousands of employees & engineers distributed across 30+ countries.

Our main Engineering Design Centers are in the Middle East. Additionally, we have offices in Europe, Asia, Africa, & Gulf.Our engineers use Autodesk Revit heavily across all these geographically dispersed offices. Revit file-based work-sharing is used by the engineers to enable collaboration between them within the same project.

Recently, we have been asked to allow geographically distributed engineering teams to work and collaborate on the same Revit Project. This means many engineers need to access the same Revit files across WAN-VPN links which are currently very slow and takes a lot of time. Network latency between our design offices ranges from at least 80 ms to 200 ms. Revit activities like Sync with Central, Reload Latest, Opening the central model, and others takes alot of time if the Remote engineers needs to perform such operation over a VPN link and with 100ms of latency.

Replicating Revit files across offices using traditional tools like robocopy, DFS-R,… is not a viable/supported option in case of Revit Central Model file-based work-sharing mode. (due Multiple users accessing the same file and doing changes at the same time==> version conflicts for rvt files).

Note that we currently are using Revit Server and Revit Accelerators between offices, but this solutions is still too slow and not fulfilling the engineers needs

We are trying to find a solution to replicate/synchronize two-ways the Shared Folder hosting the Revit Project files Central Models from Windows-File-Server-A in Office-A to Windows-File-Server-B in Site-B thus giving our users a LAN experience when accessing the Revit Central Models and not via WAN/Internet which is slow.
This kind of file synchronization needs to be in both ways and in real-time allowing users to access the same replicated Revit file from both locations and doing changes (Sync with Central,...) at the same time (a kind of Global/distributed File locking mechanism).

any ideas ?

thanks,

[syman2000]

Have you consider remote desktop where you remote into company's computer to work and sync. Also have you explore BIM360 (ACC)?

[curtisridenour]

I have also worked with this issue. The only useful solution we found was to bite the bullet and pay for ACC.

We did try the Revit Server Accelerator with some ok results.

[syman2000]

Also check out Bentley Projectwise. I've work with Revit using projectwise. It is an alternative if you don't want your project save in the cloud.

[tech]

VPN just isn't fast or stable enough. The lowest-latency VPN setups I've seen are enough to make some work possible, but model corruption was far more common. Revit doesn't handle packet loss well.

The two ways around this are ACC, or providing users with computers that they can control remotely in the office where the model lives with a program like Teamviewer or LogMeIn. ACC requires a bit of user training and is more expensive in the long term, but users won't experience the constant lag of controlling a computer on the other side of the world. 

My personal recommendation would be ACC. We made the switch from remote computers a few years ago, and it is much easier on everyone involved. 

[Alfredo_Medina]

I am surprised to see that Revit Server is still available. This brings bad memories to me. My advice is to go with BIM360 (or its current name). Works well.

Revit server + VPN = headaches. 

[mohammad.badranHYA7R]

hi @syman2000 ,

thanks for your answers.

we cant use BIM360/BIm Collab due to data security and privacy reasons.

the RDP/VDI route could be a solution in our case but this requires hundreds of desktops hosted in the data center where VDI is complex and expensive to deploy and operate. also we cant guarnatee the engineer remote session performance over a 100ms Internet connection from remote country/home.

[mohammad.badranHYA7R]

hi @syman2000 

you mean Bentley Projectwise can be hosted purely on-premise data centers ?

[mohammad.badranHYA7R]

thank you @tech ,

we are PoC-ing HP Anyware (a.k.a Teradici PCoIP agents) to see if the remote engineering session will be workable or not.

how does ACC actually function ? and why it is operating without issues while other solutions suffer to perform well in the case of Revit File-based central models, i mean solutions like NASUNI, PANZURA, PEERGFS, Resilio,etc...

how Autodesk solved this issue with ACC ? personally, i still didnt try the ACC solution and i dont know how it really operates, but i could imagine there is a ACC client installed on the engineer laptop/desktop like OneDrive and syncs the revit central model to ACC online servers ==> megabytes to be transfered over 100ms latencies, file locks, so other engineers will face some kind of slowness/hang issues-- thats what i estimate, yet to checked deeper.

[mohammad.badranHYA7R]

hi @Alfredo_Medina ,

Revit Server + Accelerator is the only "supported" solution we got in our hands.

you are right that Revit Server is slow and currently causing problems in our case between countries. it is like 5 times slower than working on same file server

[David_W_Koch]

@mohammad.badranHYA7R 

Like Revit Server, ACC/BIM 360 only sends the changes made back and forth, not the entire model, when synchronizing. Unlike Revit Server, it does not require everyone to be in a single domain.  The user just needs a good internet connection. 

We were already using BIM 360 to support projects staffed from multiple offices across the US when COVID-19 hit and moved most there afterwards to support working from home.  We were having too much model corruption when users were trying to synchronize over VPN (despite being told not to do so) .

Like most anything in this life, ACC is not perfect. Users who are far from the data center and/or have a poor internet connection will experience lags that may make them (and the rest of the project team) less efficient than they would like.  And there have been (mercifully few) outages where suddenly no one is getting any work done.

But all-in-all I would say that we are pleased with the staffing flexibility ACC allows. Setting aside those connecting over WiFi or DSL or trying to do work on a model hosted on the US server from Europe or China (just take your vacation!), being able to build project teams with staff from any office or being able to draw on staff from anywhere when a project needs extra help to meet a deadline is a major plus.

I will not deny that there are not some who are not happy with the additional expense, but if you take into account all of the costs of not using ACC (slow Revit performance or having to add more staff to cover everything locally; all the time we used to spend exchanging models with outside consultants), I believe that a cost-benrfit analysis would come out on the positive side for us.