Revit Server experience?

[cliff collins]

Does anyone here have experience using Revit Server with remote offices?
good/bad/ otherwise?

We have begun testing it with one of our remote locations, and are currently
trying a "tunnel VPN router to router" connection.

So far, it works. Test project was about 4 linked Revit models, about 200 MB
total combined file sizes.

But we have not "officially" rolled it out for real-world production--but we are hoping
to do this late this year/early 2011.

[Dive_Syko]

Hey Cliff,

I'll be following this post to see results. I haven't started our tests on this end yet.

Happy Holidays

P.S. have you tested out Bluestreak for communication across WAN? I like it so far.

[LeanneZ]

checking in for updates from Cliff...

[jasonbailly]

We have lots of offices and lots of worksharing. Only one big project on Revit Server currently but it has five offices working simultaneously and we already have a total of nine Local Servers.
Experience is generally pretty good. Not being able to roll-back or promote a local copy to a new Central with a 'Save As' is a pretty big issue. The only choice you have is to remove the current central file and create a new one from an older local copy. Initiall this didn't seem like that big of a deal but there is a problem...
Any Local Servers, other that the one that you are connected to when you perform the model replacement, will not be able to access the Central File if they have done so in the past. Basically their Local Server 'remembers' the old model and will tell you that 'Revit Server is not accessible'. What needs to be done is to manually delete folders and then reconnect to the 'new' Central File.

I'm trying to get people to adopt Bluestreak. In basic testing it seems pretty useful. There are some shortcomings when it comes to managing the Bluestreak Groups but the dev team is aware of them.

[Dive_Syko]

Thanks for the updates Jason. This is all good stuff to hear.

cheers

[cliff collins]

Update:

We have successfully installed Revit Server in all 3 offices, and added a Central Revit Server on the "cloud" at our remote data center.
All servers are Win Server 2008 R2 64 bit. We have firewalls and VPN tunnels in a "hub/spoke" setup in place.
We had some hiccups with IIS 7 and permissions on one of the Local Revit Servers--but got it working.

We are beginning work on two projects--the 1st one a small, simple 4 story hotel, and the 2nd a much larger, complex project--a new Casino and
7 story Hotel. So far all is running well. Will keep you posted.

cheers

[Alex Cunningham]

Thank you for posting an update. Good info here.

[troygates]

I was wondering if anyone using Revit server has monitored the resources used on the local server versus the central server. Does the local server need more or less horsepower as the central server? I'm asking because we have several 2 yr old workstations that we could easily setup as local servers, but if they require server grade hardware, then we'd rather not make that mistake and have to upgrade them later. Potentially, I will be setting up a central server with 6-8 local servers in remote offices.

[Twiceroadsfool]

I would wager the more traffic the local gets, the more serious the hardware has to be. Whats a baseline minimum? Well, check my blog or Kelly Cone's... A Dell laptop thats functioning AS a workstation manages to run as a local server for one user in quite a satisfactory fashion, however unspported that might be... So it cant require THAT much hardware.

Weve got it up in all of our offices now, on Xeon 3.16's with 4 GB of RAM. Running Server 2008 R2. LOL.

[bmccallum]

...I'm asking because we have several 2 yr old workstations that we could easily setup as local servers, but if they require server grade hardware, then we'd rather not make that mistake and have to upgrade them later.

Troy, we used workstation hardware for our proof-of-concept on RS when it was released in the fall. We are still using them for testing but not production. They worked fine for a while but we have experienced random errors.

I would not rely on them for production. The workstation hardware is simply not designed to be used in a server role.

Just my $0.02