Use this section only if your organization is implementing a secure portal by installing Secure Remote Access. As you did for portal, for Secure Remote Access, you must first establish your Gateway instances baseline sizing estimate. A single machine can have one Gateway installation but multiple instances. Secure Remote Access enables you to install multiple Gateways, each running multiple instances.) Your design decisions help you make accurate estimates regarding Secure Remote Access user sessions and concurrency.
You must first establish your Gateway instances baseline sizing estimate. This baseline figure represents what you must have to satisfy your Gateway user sessions and concurrency needs.
Establishing an appropriate sizing estimate for your Secure Remote Access deployment is an iterative process. You might wish to change the inputs to generate a range of sizing results. Test these results against your original requirements. You can avoid most performance problems by formulating your requirements correctly and setting realistic expectations of Secure Remote Access performance.
Properly sizing the Gateway is difficult, and using the Gateway sizing tool is only the beginning. Gateway performance depends more on throughput then on the number of users, active users, or user sessions. Any sizing information for the Gateway has to be based on a set of assumptions.
You can choose between one, two, and four CPUs per Gateway instance. The number of CPUs bound to a Gateway instance determines the number of Gateway instances required for the deployment.
If you have numbers from a prototype of the portal with Secure Remote Access, you can use these numbers in the Gateway sizing tool to arrive at more accurate results. You would fill in the following:
Measured CPU Performance. The values used to help calculate the number of Gateway instances include:
Initial Portal Desktop Display, hits per second per CPU
Portal Desktop Reloads, hits per second per CPU
Netlet Applications Block Size. This value specifies the Netlet application byte size. The Netlet dynamically determines the block size based on the application that is used. Block size determined by Netlet for a Telnet is based on the amount of data transferred.
You do not need to specify the Page Configuration and Scalability options if you are using trial deployment numbers.
Key performance factors are metrics that your technical representative uses as input to an automated sizing tool. The sizing tool calculates the estimated number of Gateway instances your Secure Remote Access deployment requires.
Identifying these key performance factors and giving them to your technical representative is the first step in formulating your baseline sizing figure.
These are the key performance factors:
After you calculate these key performance factors, give the figures to your technical representative. Ask that the Gateway sizing tool be run to identify the estimated number of Gateway instances.
The session characteristics of the Gateway include:
Total number of Secure Remote Access (Gateway) users
This represents the size of your user base or pool of potential users for the secure portal..
Expected percentage of total users using the Gateway (at maximum load)
Apply a percentage to your total number of users to determine this figure.
Average time between page hits
This is how often on average a user requests a page from the portal server.
Session average time
This determines how many logins per second that the Gateway must sustain for a given number of concurrent users.
Consider the following Netlet characteristics of the Gateway, which can have a impact on calculating the number of Gateway instances:
Netlet is enabled in the Portal Server administration console.
If Netlet is enabled, the Gateway needs to determine whether the incoming traffic is Netlet traffic or Portal Server traffic. Disabling Netlet reduces this overhead since the Gateway assumes that all incoming traffic is either HTTP or HTTPS traffic. Disable Netlet only if you are sure you do not want to use any remote applications with Portal Server.
Expected percentage of total users using Netlet
Apply a percentage to your total number of users to determine this figure.
Expected throughput
Determine the expected throughput of your Gateway, expressed in kilobits per second (Kbps).
Netlet Cipher (encryption) being used
Choices include Native VM and Java software plugin ciphers.