Sizing and monitoring your deployment

This section includes

The Ivanti File Director platform is enterprise ready and can be scaled to accommodate the syncing requirements of any organization.

Unless deploying to a test environment, we recommend that all production deployments are configured with at least 2 nodes (for resiliency / redundancy purposes).

A question often asked is how many appliances are require to service <x> number of users. Unfortunately this is not a straightforward calculation as every environment is different, both in terms of the features used, and the end user data and usage patterns. There are many factors which can influence this figure, as detailed below.

Features which may contribute to platform load, thereby impacting scalability:

•Kerberos Single Sign-On

•Shared map points (server locking)

•Platform Notifications (disabled by default in 2018.1 onwards)

•In-location Sync / Mapped Drives configuration

•PST sync

•Delta syncs

•Manual vs Automatic map points

Environmental considerations which may impact scalability:

•SMB version in use on file server (SMB3 is more efficient than SMB2)

•Usage pattern / concurrency of end users (E.g. users in same timezone / working hours vs distributed)

•Number of files

•Frequency of file changes (churn)

•Size of files

•Performance (throughput/latency) of storage

•Performance of hypervisor

•Performance (throughput/latency) of network

•Number of map points

•Maximum size of Kerberos token configured (where Kerberos SSO is used - the smaller the better)

•Number of concurrent onboarding users (syncing for the first time, or receiving replacement hardware).
Note, this is the more important consideration when scaling File Director.

The most accurate way to size a deployment is to deploy a pilot to a sample number of users, against a small number of appliances, and monitor appliance utilization to evaluate how close to capacity the platform is. Then plan the final number of appliances using this data.

Monitoring of your appliance health

File Director provides a syslog stream which can be used to provide real-time monitoring of the status and performance of your File Director cluster.

Third party software such as Splunk or the ELK stack can be used to index the syslog data and report a wide range of metrics. The data can indicate the overall health of system and can alert you to potential performance issues before they impact users.

Dashboards created using syslog audit stream provide a graphical representation of your cluster performance. They are highly configurable but can show the status of all nodes, including metrics such as connections, threads, CPU, memory usage and API response time.

From this information you can then make an informed decision on whether you will need more or less appliances or whether you have enough capacity to onboard more users.

Ready-made dashboards