How many concurrent users can I handle?

[CharlesYuVA]

Hi, experts!

We have a group of users who are currently using Tableau and may move to SAS in the future, and I've been tasked with assessing our configuration to see if we can handle it. Currently, we have relatively few users (~20 total, no more than 5 at a time). It's possible that we will end up with about 10 times that - around 200 users, 50 concurrent hitting Web Report Studio, the Portal, BI Dashboard, and OLAP Cubes.

Does anyone know of any guidance as to how many cores, how much RAM, and so on, our compute and web tiers may need to serve a group of that size?

Thanks in advance!

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

I strongly recommend you engage with your SAS Account Manager as they provide a free sizing service that will enable you to scope the required hardware correctly. Data volumes are necessary as part of the exercise as well. 

[CharlesYuVA]

Thanks - I will do that. I can develop a mean stored process and set permissions all day, but I'm new at the performance tuning and scaling aspect.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Some other thoughts:

- in today's world, I strongly recommend to set up your SAS server(s) as virtual platforms, so you can easily expand/reduce the configuration as needed or appropriate.

- start at the lower end of the sizes recommended by SAS (with the exception of disk space; that's basically cheap and does not influence your SAS licensing costs). Keep in mind that SAS servers are licensed along a count of cores.

- take care of a high sustained data rate on your storage in all situations; SSD's are to be preferred especially for all the WORK and UTILLOC spaces

- a real-time example: ~200 defined users in SAS metadata. 10 to 40 concurrent workspace servers for EG users, ~10 users concurrently active via STP, only a few using WRS. One server (all tiers) on an AIX LPAR with 2 POWER8 cores and 64 GB of RAM. Keep in mind that POWER cores give you some more performance than Intel-based processors.

[MargaretC]

Configuring SAS 9 to run in a virtualized environment works fine, provided you setup the virtualized systems (both processors and storage) to run efficiently with SAS. The first thing to know is to make sure you thickly provision the processors, memory and storage being used by SAS applications.
Here are two papers that discuss what needs to be done in VMware for SAS 9 to work efficiently with VMware:

* Moving SAS Applications from a Physical to a Virtual VMware Environment http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/MovingVirtuaVMware.pdf
* Deploying SAS Grid Systems on VMware ESXi Virtually Provisioned Storage (https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2018/1931-2018.pdf) The concepts in this paper are valid for SAS 9 non-Grid implementations as well.

Cheers,
Margaret