Hardware recommendations for Panorama NovaView servers.

This document assumes the recommended server deployment: a dedicated Panorama server, and a dedicated OLAP server.

Panorama has been asked to provide a list of minimal hardware requirements. However, it’s very difficult to come up with a strict formula which predicts the minimal hardware requirements for the Panorama NovaView Server. The reason for that is that the performance of NovaView system is highly dependent on the data and on the user behavior, more precisely on the following factors:
1. Size of the analyzed data
2. MS Analysis Services server configuration; specifically the aggregation level
3. Complexity of the server data calculations
4. Complexity of the views or reports
5. Number of components in a portal or a dashboard page
6. Number of named users
7. User’s behavior/aggressiveness
And even more.
Considering the multitude of contributing factors, it is almost impossible to come up with some generic guidelines which would answer any hardware requirements question.

NovaView itself is a highly efficient software which, given a single user and a small cube, can be easily installed and used on a simple PC. One of the reasons for this is that starting from Novaview 5.0 and up, most of the resource-consuming operations are performed on the OLAP machine, therefor bottlenecks on the Panorama machine will not hamper performance noticeably.
However, when deploying the system one has to take into consideration the above factors, and to provide for an adequate buffer of extra available resources.

Number of CPU and the amount of RAM are the two major parameters of the hardware requirements. Number of CPUs is more or less proportional to the number of concurrent users the system can support. For example, if you used to run NovaView server with 4 CPUs for 50 concurrent users, you might need to consider 8 CPUs machine or 2 load balanced 4 CPUs servers to support 100 concurrent users (on the same data and in the same environment).
We recommend a strict minimum of 4 CPUs.

Physical RAM should be enough to run all the pnSessionHost.exe processes. Once the server resorts to using the virtual memory (due to a lack of physical RAM), the performance of all the users and all the views will dramatically decrease. In this case, you should increase the amount of physical RAM at NovaView's disposal. We recommend a strict minimum of 4GB of RAM.

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