NINTEX Hardware Requirements

  • 3 January 2017
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Our current NINTEX infrastructure which is based on top of our SharePoint installation is as follows:
1. One Application Server
2. One WFE Server
3. One Database Server

We are in the process of optimizing our servers where in we will be removing the the WFE server, such that there is only one server acting as both WFE and Application.

We will then be installing NINTEX Workflow 2010 on this optimized server. The queries that I have regarding this are as follows:

1. What should be the minimum hardware requirement for the NINTEX workflows to run smoothly
2. Will the hardware requirement specified for SharePoint be sufficient to handle the NINTEX workflows


5 replies

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I get asked this question a lot, and there is no one general answer to give.  The answer depends on how rigorously your users use workflow.  Start with the minimum hardware requirements for SharePoint 2010, which is what I assume you're running since you're planning to deploy Nintex Workflow 2010.  Monitor the CPU and RAM usage with a tool and adjust accordingly as needed.

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Thanks for the response.
We have around 15 workflows currently in operation, with varying number of users per day. The usage increases typically after the 10th of every month since most of these are approval workflows. Is there any way where we can find out what are the number of instances running at any given point in time to arrive at an average number of workflows running/day. This will help us in arriving at a figure for the hardware requirements.

Thanks

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The Nintex report and chart web parts which ship with Nintex Workflow Enterprise will show you a table or chart of the number of workflows started over a 30 day period; this is an out-of-the-box report. This is the easiest way to find out how many workflow instances are being run on a daily basis and to detect trends (e.g. a usage increase after the 10th of the month). The Workflows In Progress (All Sites) report will show you a table of all the workflows that are currently in progress. This will tell you how many workflow instances are In Progress, but not how many are being processed on the farm servers. You could have 1,000 In Progress workflows, but only 1 being actively processed. Idle, in progress workflows do not consume CPU, RAM, or IOPS resources.

You can't really find out how many workflows are being processed, but you can enforce a value. For this, you'll need to dig in to the Workflow Scalability and Performance settings and tweak them to behave as needed. You can find this article on MSDN here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441390(v=office.12).aspx  This article was referred to me by Microsoft Premier Support despite the fact that it's archived.

There is a farm property called workflow-eventdelivery-throttle which you can get using stsadm.exe -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle and set using stsadm.exe -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle -pv "x" where x is any number between 1 and, I'm guessing, Int32.MaxValue. This value controls how many workflow instances are allowed to run, farm-wide, at any given time. You can set this property to a value consistent with end-user behavior, or you can set it to a small value to ensure your farm never runs more than X workflows at a time. This can help with performance tuning as it introduces a control value. Start low and work your way up until you notice a performance hit then pare back.

I can also recommend checking out the other farm properties documented in the MSDN article. Collectively they allow you to control behaviors like throughput, timing resolution, and average wait time.

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Hi Juan,

         Here is the detailed hardware requirements for Nintex . pdf

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DId any of these answers satisfy your question?

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