We have around 1500 users in different locations in three countries and we are using a Domino server in cluster in our main Data Centre (version 6.5.2) . All users access their server-based email files through the WAN. The problem is that depending on the WAN usage the access could be sometimes slow affecting the user experience with the application. We are looking for information to decide whether installing local servers for sites with more than XX number of users, or start using local replicas in all clients with a background replication each 5 or 10 minutes.
I saw the following documents
Second solution is cheaper and easier, but the main problem we see is the quota management because when you replicate e-mails from the local to the server DB the quota doesn’t warn the user if he/she ran out of space.
Do you have any suggestion ? Unfortunately the Web Access is not an option in the short term because the users like the local client…
Subject: User access to local email replica vs server-based
I have a very similar environment to yours, and ALL of my users have local replicas. I have 2 clustered servers at the corporate office, and 1400 users that are distributed world-wide (about 260 at the corporate office, about 300 sales people, about 300 international users).
Like someone already said, the server will deposit over quota messages in the user’s mailbox, which will replicate to local. I configure mine to run every 4 hours, which means the offenders get multiple warnings per day.
If you create custom apps, enable Enforce Consistent ACL on those apps so that Roles work on the local replicas. You can even create code that checks “if local, do this, else do that”.
Local replicas are much faster than server dbs - most of my users call our Help Desk because of terrible performance when they accidentally open a db directly on the server. All those local users also reduce the workload on the server.
My users replicate every 10 minutes. We also set the Location Doc setting “Transfer outgoing mail if X messages pending” to 1. That causes the client to immediately connect to the server to send messages, but to wait for the replication interval to receive them.
One last issue for local users is NAB lookups and type-ahead. You may need to implement some type of Directory Catalog.
Subject: User access to local email replica vs server-based
Since bandwidth seems to be one of the primary bottlenecks that you described, using network compression is an obvious YES. Do that regardless of which approach you implement. I hybrid approach may be useful, especially if you have a few large sites and many small ones.
If you currently have a single Domino server, deploying one or more regional servers will provide LAN speeds to “local” users add some redundancy (for fail-over). Configure server connections for immediate mail routing with semi-frequent replication of other NSFs. You might want to replicate all NSFs to some remote servers for backup. This could be a big win for overseas users. OTOH Remotely providing server support could have potential drawbacks. FWIW I have never seen or touched the Domino servers I support – it is not a serious issue in my environment.
Local replicas with scheduled replication can give the user the impression of having a superfast network (though there is some delay in seeing new mail). Be sure to plan user training in advance while expecting some impact on the number of calls you will receive for a while. You may choose to have some users continue to use server-based mail (especially “hard-to-train” users).
Subject: User access to local email replica vs server-based
users will get an over quota error report e-mail from the server when they are near or over quota. db size will differ from local to server do to folder/view indexes so it won’t be 100% accurate but at least it’s something. If you’ve got quotas configured correctly here’s what the user would see:
Mail file and quota information
Your mail file on Mail01/Server/Acme at 05/23/2007 03:11 PM
Current usage: 134,201 Kilobytes
Quota Warning threshold: 107,520 Kilobytes
Quota Size limit: 112,640 Kilobytes
What should you do?
Your mail file exceeds or would exceed the quota size limit specified by the Administrator. Although new messages will be delivered anyways, you should delete or archive messages as soon as possible to avoid receiving additional notifications of this type.