Key Parameters

Standard Configuration

• 64 GB RAM

• 1-TB Disk RAID 10 for data. The amount of disk space necessary depends on the frequency of data collected (number of work orders, operations, production quantities, etc.) and the amount of data kept online in the Production database.

Microsoft Components

• Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator

MES Components

• MES database

• MES Middleware Proxy

• MES Middleware, if Enterprise Integration or Supply Chain Connector (SCC) databases are installed

Other AVEVA Components

• Work Tasks Farm and repository databases

• Historian Runtime database

• Enterprise Integration or Supply Chain Connector (SCC) databases

• Recipe/Batch Management databases

Scalability

• Try to keep the Database Server on one machine, if possible.

• Take the following steps to improve server performance:

  • Add additional memory. The memory on a Database Server is not linear and at a certain point adding more memory will not help.

  • Add additional CPUs. The CPU usage is most significantly based on the number of transactions, which is usually related to the number of users. If CPU performance is affected and there are many users connected, then increasing the number of CPUs will help. If the CPU is limited by large transactions then adding additional CPUs may not help.

  • Move the MES middleware, Work Tasks Farm and repository databases, and Historian Runtime database to other servers.

  • Use Database Cluster technology.

• To accommodate these potential performance solutions, use a server whose CPUs and memory are expandable, and use the Enterprise edition of SQL Server.

• Weekly or monthly, monitor the database for index and table fragmentation. Fragmentation levels greater than 30% will cause performance degradation.

High Availability/Fault Tolerance

Recommended with:

• Windows fail-over cluster

Key Measures

• CPU usage < 30%

• Memory stable with 1 GB free

Data Storage Requirements

• C: OS: 80 GB available RAID 0.

• D: Data: 300 GB available RAID 10.

• E: Backup: 300 GB, no RAID.

• Optional: You can keep the logs and tempDB on a separate physical disk to improve performance.

• F: Logs: 40 GB available RAID 10. Monitor the transaction log file to ensure that it is not constantly growing, which can be a sign of missed backups or other issues.

Other Databases

The Production Database Server typically runs the following databases:*

• MES database

• Work Tasks Farm and repository databases

• Historian Runtime database

• Enterprise Integration databases

  In a typical solution, it does not run the following:

• Galaxy repository databases

• BI Gateway database

• ReportServer database

*Ideally, these databases should be run on their own server. However, in practice, if the Historian Runtime database is being used only for MES, then it can be run on the Production Database Server. The Work Tasks databases should be separated in an implementation with many workflow transactions.