Steelhead Appliance

[reilly]

What specific patches are your referring to? We are evealuating a Steelhead right now and are not getting acceptable results (we use the 2006 version of Land Desktop)

QUOTE(Bob Gilbert @ May 1 2007, 12:54 PM) 248

epanzeter,

There are a number of Riverbed customers that are seeing good acceleration results with AutoDesk Land Desktop. What version of Land Desktop are you running and what issues/performance are you experiencing with your Riverbed Steelhead deployment against AutoDesk Land? Newer versions seem to work better. I may also have some tweaks to offer depending on your situation.

Older versions of Land Desktop had issues which limited the degree to which application traffic was accelerated by Riverbed-powered appliances. However, Autodesk has made patches available which improved some issues, and Riverbed has also added some features that help. Testing with the 2006 release of Land Desktop and the 2.1.4 release of Steelhead software results in very good acceleration on operations like opening projects.

Attached are some performance results. Even at 8ms RTT, an operation was reduced from 303 seconds to 47 seconds.

[fendesj]

The setting you are referring to is for Overlapping Open. This is a CIFS feature. This setting is to enable Overlapping Open for only certain file extensions, or to enable for all except certain extensions. If you enable the Overlapping Opens feature you then select one of the two above mentioned settings. If Overlapping Opens is enable, the default is to provide this optimization feature for file extensions "doc, pdf, ppt, sldasm, slddrw, slddwg, sldprt, txt, vsd, xls". You can select the second option which is to use this optimization feature for all files except for those with extensions "ldb, mdb". The file extensions are just the defaults and you can change them. Overlapping Open is a specific CIFS feature so the setting applies to this feature only and not to CIFS optimization in general. With Overlapping Open turned off the Steelhead will still perform latency and bandwidth optimization if it can. As I understand the Overlapping Open feature its intent is to move CIFS lock management from the client to the Steelhead. This allows Oplocks to be held in situations where applications open the same file multiple times (a curious behavior) so latency optimization can occur.

[mi24k2]

See the quote from Ray Sirois to me...he is right. The problem lies with in the .mdb and SH's inablity to optimize connections for these types of files. There is even a prepopulated setting in RIOS v. 3.0.3, that states optimize all connections but these ".mdb and .ldb".

[bgilbert]

epanzeter,

There are a number of Riverbed customers that are seeing good acceleration results with AutoDesk Land Desktop. What version of Land Desktop are you running and what issues/performance are you experiencing with your Riverbed Steelhead deployment against AutoDesk Land? Newer versions seem to work better. I may also have some tweaks to offer depending on your situation.

Older versions of Land Desktop had issues which limited the degree to which application traffic was accelerated by Riverbed-powered appliances. However, Autodesk has made patches available which improved some issues, and Riverbed has also added some features that help. Testing with the 2006 release of Land Desktop and the 2.1.4 release of Steelhead software results in very good acceleration on operations like opening projects.

Attached are some performance results. Even at 8ms RTT, an operation was reduced from 303 seconds to 47 seconds.

Message Edited by bgilbert on 01-28-2009 04:29 PM

[epanzeter]

I can honestly say that if you hope to use AutoCAD Land Desktop (LDT) over WAN with Steelheads you are going to be severely disappointed. My boss is still salty that the Riverbed reps swore that it would work and it didn't (I wasn't working for the company at the time). There's a lot of bad vibes over the Riverbed from users for just that reason as well.

If you want to use LDT, don't expect to over WAN connections. Save yourself the trouble.

[Ray]

Hi Alan, we have not observed this quite to the level that you have. We are an AutoCAD 2007 shop. Our links to branches are point to point T1s which also carry VoIP and videoconf, but I don't think that is a significant difference. We'd have used DSL-VPN strategies like you if it were not for VoIP etc. I will say that I do upgrade the hardware for folks in the branch offices more aggressively than I do for folks in the central office. Let's be honest, remote users don't have exactly the same performance over the WAN as the users in the central office have on the LAN. So, having more RAM and faster CPUs really helps make up the difference for them, and it is appreciated.

[alan.saxon]

I am interested in any application configuration changes people have made to improve AutoCAD performance using Steelheads. We have just setup a remote site which connects over a VPN back to our office and we seem to have slow startup times with Autocad. We have pre-populated the data directory they are using and also most of the locations where utilities are located but startup is still slow about 90-120 secs. I am guessing AutoCAD might write back to the server temporary files to recover or back-out changes and this may be the cause, I have seen this with Word. Any suggestions. This is straight AutoCAD, MXRoad seems to be OK, well users are not complaining yet.

[Ray]

Hi mi24k2,

I'll spell this out for the benefit of other readers.
Autodesk's Land Desktop (LDT) heavily leverages MS Access databases for the storage of surfaces, points, alignments. Multi-user database files like MDB files with MS Access are a challenge for SH. Instead of file locking, databases utilize record locking. I doubt there is any optimizing taking place. So, MS Access type stuff really should not be done over a WAN unless it is thru Citrix or MS Terminal Server (which Autodesk will not support). So it IS a problem without a good solution.

Work Around,
We have only one regular user in a branch office using LDT all the time. He actually coordinates closely with the other LDT users when he needs to work on a project. He virtually signs out the whole
LDT project file area by renaming it, he then copies the whole LDT project down to his office, does his work, copies the work products back to the central office, then renames the project back so everyone knows the data are accessible to them again. The only reason the work around works for them is they don't all have to be working on the same project at the same time.

Clearly the better architecture of C3D will help this work better from our preliminary testing.

Ray

[mi24k2]

I also work in an ACAD (currently using 2005) enviroment. I was wondering how you are dealing with the LDT issues and the SH's? My users complain of how slow LDT is over the link.

----------------------
Network Enviroment
All Windows Desktops
1020's in branch offices
2010 in HQ
T1's

[Ray]

Hi all,
We have been utilizing Steelhead (SH) technology for 3 years now (early adopter on beta). Besides MS Office, one of the major apps we use the most is AutoCAD. The SH-s have enabled us to put all our data in our main office, and all the employees in the branch offices work in real time over the WAN links on the server in our main office. We like this architecture as all our projects are the product of work progressed by employees physically located in all five of our offices. This past year we upgraded to 2007, and we are starting to look at utilizing C3D (Civil 3D)and ABS (Building Systems) which we have not been taking much advantage of. Some preliminary testing of C3D shows that it works over the WAN better than Land Desktop does. But, we really are not using it in production yet. I would be interested in hearing from users out there that have real live production happening over their WAN using C3D, ABS, Revit, or any of the other more advanced "verticals" that Autodesk has out there.