Back in the day (in the first instances of epicor without progress) we had epicor install our servers. We’ve kept the same structure ever since but are about to build for 2025.2 on premises that will have to last us another 50 years ;). I’ve never seen much activity on the 2nd appserver that purely runs task agent on the live system. Is there any real benefit of having a appserver that just runs the task agent anymore or is it better to have the agent on the main appsvr? The reporting has been fine tuned nowadays and there really doesn’t seem to be an slowing of the system that there was in the early days. we probably only have 75 concurrant users at the most. Your views would be most appreciated.
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With just the 75 user count to go on I would not run 2 app servers, I doubt you are getting much benefit from it.
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I always run separate task agent servers. Usually two task servers in case one task agent fails the other can pickup processing. We have a lot of task agent activity and scheduled processes. So moving that off the main app servers makes sense. It also doesn’t put all your eggs in one basket on a single server.
Ultimately probably wouldn’t see a big performance difference either way. More just personal preference and experience.
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With 75 users you could go with one good app server but Chadd makes some good points too. Ultimately it goes down to your budget.
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I would ask if you are virtualized or running physical servers? If they are physical, what’s the acceptable downtime when hardware (or Microsoft) fails? If you are virtualized, I’d have a weekly snapshot routine so you always have an instant recovery point.
Otherwise every comment is correct - it’s based on load and user perceived response time, but the real effectiveness comes only if you have load balancing turned on - which I believe requires 3 total servers.
And like Chad, we use our second server as the task agent server. It also is the endpoint for the Mobile CRM and Wireless Warehouse Apps, and all API access. That leaves the primary server for the users.
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I didn’t mention this but same for us. The tasks servers are the endpoints for all integration services - API, Workato, custom internal apps, etc.
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We put what we call our “interactive” App Server on a beefy SQL Server where it gets the best performance. Desktop Kinetic users, EKW app, and Task Agent route through this – the workloads where performance matters most.
Then we have a separate box with an appserver for DMT, API integrations, Service Connect, etc. where performance is not as critical. The purpose is just to remove workloads off the interactive appserver.
We’ve basically tried everything over the years and this has yielded the best results in my experience.
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Thanks for all your wise replies. After testing and balancing everything. I’m going down the one server route. If this proves in the future to stretch the resource of the box I can always add another VM to handle it. Thanks again
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