MOVEit Transfer Deployment Options

This guide helps you estimate how many server machines you will require for a production MOVEit Transfer environment.

Useful Terminology

The following terms to help describe scale-out and sizing of a MOVEit system.

  • Node. A single Windows Server machine running MOVEit Transfer and its associated services.
  • Action. A MOVEit action that is recorded to the audit log. Examples of a MOVEit action include a file upload, a file download, user sign on, user sign off, delete file, move file, add user, delete user, and so on.
  • Transfer. A single file upload or file download event.

MOVEit Transfer Single Node (all-in-one server)

MOVEit Transfer provides a single node all-in-one server installation that installs the MySQL database on the same server. This configuration is easy to deploy but it has limitations because MOVEit Transfer and the database will compete for the same CPU, RAM, and disk resources. As more actions are processed by MOVEit Transfer the number of database transactions will increase, which limits the scalability of this deployment. Progress recommends the all-in-one server deployment scheme only for small loads that do not require high availability.

MOVEit Transfer can also be deployed as a single node with a remote Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL database. This configuration can improve the performance of a single node server because there will be no competition for resources between MOVEit and the database. This configuration still does not provide high availability, but it can make the future transition to a high availability deployment easier.

MOVEit Transfer Web Farm (High-Availability)

MOVEit Transfer Web Farm (High Availability) deployments allow for balancing file transfer loads across a cluster of MOVEit Transfer servers. This configuration provides redundancy and scalability to a MOVEit deployment. A MOVEit Transfer Web Farm includes the following items:

  • Two or more MOVEit Transfer nodes

  • Load balancer

  • Remote database (Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL or AWS RDS with MSSQL)

  • Remote storage (provided by UNC share or Azure Blob storage)

Note: High Availability (HA) Web Farm deployments with nodes distributed across different datacenters is not an officially supported deployment pattern.

Sizing Guidelines

The table below provides high-level guidance for initial configuration. There are many factors that influence overall performance. These include (but are not limited to) file size, user sign-on and connections without file upload or download action, custom report generation, and the baseline or periodic latency of your network or storage. Some examples to consider when sizing and configuring your system are:

  • Transferring many small files is RAM and CPU intensive. Transferring very large files is inherently disk I/O and network bandwidth intensive.

  • Uploading multiple files per sign-on performs better than uploading one file per sign-on.

  • Where possible, schedule large bulk transfer operations during non-peak periods or divide them up to run at non-overlapping intervals throughout the day.
    Table 1. Sizing Guidance
    Metric (per day) 1 Node (All-in-One Server) 2 Node Web Farm 3 Node Web Farm 4 Node Web Farm
    File Transfers up to ~20,000 up to ~100,000 up to ~400,000 400,000+
    Actions up to ~100,000 up to ~250,000 up to ~750,000 1 million +
    Data Transferred up to ~100 GB up to ~500 GB up to 1 TB 1 TB+