Site-to-Site VPN Performance good enough to run quickbooks enterprise for other locations?

ppilot

Weaksauce
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Feb 1, 2003
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So we are looking at upgrading our Network Infrastructure with some Fortinet UTM's (2-30E's, 1-60E's) and I was wondering if the site-to-site performance would be good enough for for the users at the other locations to access an accounting program such as Quickbooks Enterprise on a daily basis. I know there's a number of variables that can affect performance, but it should be significantly better than your basic normal VPN (like Open VPN), correct?
 
No. QB should not be run over a VPN of any type. The DB will get corrupted easily with any type of drop outs or other internet glitches. Best to run QB on Remote Desktop Services if you have multiple remote users.
 
No. QB should not be run over a VPN of any type. The DB will get corrupted easily with any type of drop outs or other internet glitches. Best to run QB on Remote Desktop Services if you have multiple remote users.

Is this something that's unique to QB or is something that kind of stateful database would run into? We've ran Sage 50 over a VPN connection reasonably well for a while, so I wasn't sure if there was a difference.
 
Can't speak directly to Quickbooks but, running any application over a WAN link is going to feel slower than a local link. Most LAN optimized applications are extremely chatty, This means every packet that used to have 1-5ms latency now has 25+ms. Somethings become intolerable. It is not speed issue but one of latency. Given enough CPU, a VPN may not decrease speed but it will always increase latency. The actual question you've asked cannot be answered without knowing:

1. WAN link speeds
2. WAN utilization
3. Application network utilization patterns

This is why people always blame the firewall. They lack even a simple basic understanding of how things really work. Its not magic. You're not even asking the right questions. Do what your paid to do. You need do some basic testing, and measuring, over your WAN links without a VPN to establish a baseline. Compare this to the same test run locally. Now add you VPN and compare. Obviously you need to test with non-production servers and data.


BTW yes this is pet peeve barbecue I've dealt with way too many do nothing admins that always blame the firewall becuase they're clueless about their applications.
 
Can't speak directly to Quickbooks but, running any application over a WAN link is going to feel slower than a local link. Most LAN optimized applications are extremely chatty, This means every packet that used to have 1-5ms latency now has 25+ms. Somethings become intolerable. It is not speed issue but one of latency. Given enough CPU, a VPN may not decrease speed but it will always increase latency. The actual question you've asked cannot be answered without knowing:

1. WAN link speeds
2. WAN utilization
3. Application network utilization patterns

This is why people always blame the firewall. They lack even a simple basic understanding of how things really work. Its not magic. You're not even asking the right questions. Do what your paid to do. You need do some basic testing, and measuring, over your WAN links without a VPN to establish a baseline. Compare this to the same test run locally. Now add you VPN and compare. Obviously you need to test with non-production servers and data.


BTW yes this is pet peeve barbecue I've dealt with way too many do nothing admins that always blame the firewall becuase they're clueless about their applications.

I completely believe this just going through this as a part time IT guy. Too many variables to always place the blame on just one thing.
 
If an app is intolerant to LAN network issues, it will be as well when run through the internet and/or VPN. If the app doesn't have some particular requirements about latency or speed, I don't think there should be any issue whether run over LAN or WAN or VPN.
 
No. QB should not be run over a VPN of any type. The DB will get corrupted easily with any type of drop outs or other internet glitches. Best to run QB on Remote Desktop Services if you have multiple remote users.

100% this. While quickbooks will physically "run" it is a definite no no per quickbooks. Corruption is likely. From what I've read part of it comes down to the inefficiency of how the QB network communication was designed.

Running an RDS/RemoteApp is definitely the way to go.
 
100% this. While quickbooks will physically "run" it is a definite no no per quickbooks. Corruption is likely. From what I've read part of it comes down to the inefficiency of how the QB network communication was designed.

Running an RDS/RemoteApp is definitely the way to go.

This^ QB has enough trouble just working on a LAN, let alone adding in WAN variations.
 
You should not run QB on WAN. You will face intermittent issues with DB manager service and other issues while working on company files. For most of the issues with DB and services, QB support articles suggest to reboot the DB server. So even if one user has issues access one company file, you will need to reboot the server which will impact all other users. So… it is not recommended to run QB on WAN.
 
Is there a reason they can't just use the quickbooks cloud version? It's not terribly expensive
 
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