Navision Recommended Hardware Settings

Only 10 to 20% of the problems are due to infrastructural problems.When we think of "infrastructure", these items are important (in order of importance):

• RAM
• DISK
• CPU
• NETWORK

RAM:

There are some general guidelines what you need:

DB Size/Users	0-50	51-100	101-150	151-200	>200
<=25 Gb	4	8	8	12	12
<=50 Gb	8	8	12	12	16
>50 Gb	8	8	12	12	16

DISK:

The disks are the slowest components, thus very important to choose the right DISK configuration.

First of all: Don't use RAID 5. Use as many disks as you can afford, with a minimum of 3 times RAID 1 (=6 disks). Why? To split all OS files, all Transaction Log files and All Data files. If you have more than 6 disks, scale the array of the data files up to RAID 10.

CPU:

The CPU is tupically not a bottleneck, but here are some guidelines:

DB Size/Users	0-50	51-100	101-150	151-200	>200
<=25 Gb	2	4	4	6	6
<=50 Gb	4	4	6	6	8
>50 Gb	4	4	6	6	8

Now, Hynek wasn't that a fan of duo or quad cores, because it actually just performance 60% of the performance if you compare it with full CPU's... .

NETWORK:

Some very quice recommendations:

• 100Mb minimum
• The network should be switched (as switched as possible)
• On server side, best you use a 1Gb network

Now, for planning your hardware, you shouldn't only use these guidelines. Also take for instance in account other factors like the annual business growth, seasonality, ... .

On software side, it is best to keep everything up-to-date, but be aware:

• 2000 is not 2005: it does not behave the same
• 2005 uses tempdb more ... And it's may be a good idea to put it on a seperate spindle.
• 4.00 update 6 is a good release:
  • It fixes some SIFT issues
  • It does not use OPTION (FAST xx) any more
  • Is uses index hinting by default ... Bewar of that!

There are many infrastructure software setup things to think about. Amongst them (didn't catch them all):

• Degree of Parallellism should be 1
• Split the TL, Data Files and Tempdb (if necessary)
• Maintenance:
  • Update statistics
  • Rebuild indexes

Finally, the things you can do at application level.

• SQL Profiler
  Mainly used for analyzing queries that come from the Dynamics NAV client. Also for analyzing deadlocking and timeouts
• Client Monitor
  To record the server calls from within NAV. It links certain SQL queries to pieces of code in C/SIDE.
• SQL Server Mgt Views
  Keep in mind: only SQL Server 2005 has got these. Interesting dm views are:
  • Dm_db_index_usages_stats
  • Dm_exec_query_stats
  • Dw_os_wait_stats