Site to site connections

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staticz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 19, 2008
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Is anyone out there managing multiple sites? We've got 5 locations that are anywhere from 5 - 100 miles away. Currently we're connected via 20MB leased fiber lines and VPNs. The performance has been less than optimal and I am trying to gauge what some other organizations out there are doing.

Any thoughts? We're currently discussing Metro Ethernet, is there anything else out there?
 
What's running over the lines? I have several remote sites at my primary client and 20M would be an awesome amount of bandwidth to have to each site, but we generally get by with 1.5M.

So it comes down to what you are doing over that bandwidth.
 
Yeah, 20M to each of our sites would be great. Our sites with 1.5 are slooooow. 5 is alright and 10 is IMO bare minimum, but 5 gets by. How many users and what type of traffic is going over?
 
the world would be my oyster if i had 20mbps sync connections to each place...

i got 25 locations or so, ranging from 1.5/.256 (i think i only have one of these left) to 10/1, 15/2 to 35/5s
 
What kind of poor performance are you experiencing? If you are getting slow file copies etc then this is due to the nature of the Windows file system and the latency of the lines
 
What kind of work do your branches do? Are they just IP phones and a few thin clients heading back to HQ?

If so, then you could just get a 3 meg MPLS back to HQ and call it a day. Ensure you have QoS configured on both sides of the network (Your equipment) and in between (read: Tell your MPLS provider to enable it).

That's just one of many scenarios. Tell us what you are running over these lines and we can get you a more tailored response.
 
We're seeing a lot of lag transferring images (big images). A 10 page document is taking 12-15 minutes to get across, actual imaging is even worse. As for users,100 - 150 at each site running VDI back to our data centers. The two biggest sites have 20/20 fiber lines from the cable co. but it just isn't getting the job done. I believe that something else could be the culprit, but I'm not sure where to start as I've inherited this pile.

We started with a 3 meg MPLS and it lasted about 3 days. Perhaps there is some kind of massaging I can do to make things run a bit better. I just had a call and looks like Ethernet isn't a possibility at this point. :(
 
slow file copies via VPN is normal due to the limitations of the windows file system. DFS may be an option for you here.
 
Yeah, 150 employees on a 20/20 line is going to suck. We have at least a 100/100 line for sites with that many people. The nice thing about here is there is only one main ISP in the entire province and they are government owned and we are healtcare so we are government as well so we can get a private link from anywhere to anywhere in the province. Anywhere from a 100 person town to a 300,000 person city.

What if you do a speed test between sites at night when traffic is low? Are you getting what you expect then? Do you have a lot of broadcast traffic and unnecessary traffic going over the links?
 
Wait, where is your data center? If all of your VDI is hosted at one data center, the transfers wouldn't technically go over the VPN links. What is your VDI solution? Could it be a storage issue for the VDI (iops) ?
 
/usr/home said:
Yeah, 150 employees on a 20/20 line is going to suck. We have at least a 100/100 line for sites with that many people. The nice thing about here is there is only one main ISP in the entire province and they are government owned and we are healtcare so we are government as well so we can get a private link from anywhere to anywhere in the province. Anywhere from a 100 person town to a 300,000 person city.

What if you do a speed test between sites at night when traffic is low? Are you getting what you expect then? Do you have a lot of broadcast traffic and unnecessary traffic going over the links?
Click to expand...

We're healthcare as well, unfortunately there aren't any gov't ISPs around! We're full blown paperless now and this has been the last remaining challenge...

terisk said:
Wait, where is your data center? If all of your VDI is hosted at one data center, the transfers wouldn't technically go over the VPN links. What is your VDI solution? Could it be a storage issue for the VDI (iops) ?
Click to expand...

Users scan data from a Thin Client onsite into the VDI session, essentially uploading the file. Not the best way to do things, but unfortunately no one has come up with a way around it yet. VDI product is View.
 
staticz said:
Users scan data from a Thin Client onsite into the VDI session, essentially uploading the file. Not the best way to do things, but unfortunately no one has come up with a way around it yet. VDI product is View.
Click to expand...
Were I designing this solution, I would push as much as I could local. Which means, I would ditch a fully virtualized desktop environment, opting instead for full blown workstations at each site. The business application(s) would run in a remote environment. This would allow you to scan locally, which would give you greater manageability over the dataset.

Lacking that ( because I know ripping out hardware and replacing an already in place solution isn't practical ), you might want to look at the resolution and bit depth that the scanner captures images. Reduce what you can, where you can. Your VDI solution may have a way to throttle that data channel as well, allowing a more 'fair' allocation of bandwidth across the users on site.

Still. Pushing everything as close to the users is a good idea in a world where bandwidth can be prohibitively expensive.
 
What does your link saturation look like? How are you monitoring your WAN links?
 
What's the process of transfering the images? What scanners are being used and how? Are the scanners connected by usb to each view client terminal? Or ip networked? If the scanners are accessed over the network do scanned images get stored on local disk in the scanner to be retrieved by the users over ip? Or does the user's vdi session have software that syncs with the scanner and downloads the scan in progress?
 
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