AhsayPRD Best Practices and Recommendations

July 17, 2025

Best practices and recommendations which should be considered before deploying AhsayPRD with AhsayCBS to a production environment are discussed here.

Hardware Requirements

AhsayPRD should be installed on a machine supporting 64 bit multiple CPU and multiple cores. A 64 bit Operating System will allow AhsayPRD and AhsayCBS to run on a 64 bit Java JRE platform, as 64 bit Java is capable of supporting larger Java heap size settings. This type of configuration will provide sufficient capacity for future business expansion, to meet the needs of existing customers, and to support new AhsayCBS server features.

A more powerful machine will also reduce the need for frequent hardware upgrades, which will require service down time for data migration.

It is a good idea to ensure your server is equipped with some redundancy features, that is, power supply, network card and connect it to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).

The following lists the hardware requirements for AhsayPRD:

  • Processor

    Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo or above, Intel® Xeon® CPU recommended.

  • Physical Memory

    4 GB or above

    The amount of RAM required on the AhsayPRD server is proportional to the number of AhsayCBS instances installed. For example, you can configure 8GB RAM to run two AhsayCBS instances (each instance configured with 2GB Java heap size). When additional AhsayCBS instances are required, or the number of backup users on the existing AhsayCBS instances increases, you will need to add extra RAM to the AhsayPRD server.

    When setting the maximum Java heap size for AhsayCBS, ensure there is sufficient memory reserved for the operating system.

    However, it is not recommended to set excessively high values for the maximum Java heap size, as this could result in AhsayCBS performance issues during internal Java VM garbage collection or memory recycling routines.

  • Server

    Server with several removavle hard disk bays is recommended.

  • Disk Storage

    Two physical 1-2TB internal hard disks for OS and AhsayCBS application, four hard disks mounted on removable hard disk bay for reseller’s client storage. SCSI type storage array or SAN recommended.

    Example

    We have a pair of hard disks with RAID 1 formatted, and partitioned it into 2 volumes C:\ and D:\. The Windows OS is installed on C while the AhsayCBS application will be installed on D drive. Each reseller’s client data are stored into a dedicated disk with RAID 1 formatted. The amount of hard disks used and the RAID setup is purely for your reference. This setup would depend on the amount of storage required and the severity of your reseller service, RAID 5 or above setup may be required according to your reseller’s requirement.

    We are using RAID 1 for each reseller’s user home. We setup the storage as RAID 1, this is because when your reseller requires getting the hard disk for restoring purpose, we can simply take the hard disk out from the data center and deliver the hard disk to your reseller.

  • Operating System

    Server grade OS such as Windows server 2008 (64-bit) or above, Windows server 2008 R2 SP1 recommended.

    A standard Windows Server 2008 R2 has a limitation of 32GB of physical memory, if you are going to host more AhsayCBS instances or support more users on the same server, Datacenter or Enterprise edition may need to consider. Please refer to Windows Dev Center about the Memory Limits for Windows and Windows Server Releases.
Example

The following example is the hardware setup used in the following sections. It is a Dell server R510 with external disk array module MD1200. R510 has 12 slots (built-in) which use H700 internal integrated RAID controller. The external disk array module MD1200 has 12 slots and use H800 as the external RAID controller. H800 has 2 slots to control external disk array. You can add new disk array if more resellers or additional disk storage required.

Processor Intel® Xeon® CPU X5650 @2.67GHz (2 processors)
Installed RAM 32.0 GB
RAID card PERC H700 Internal Integrated (internal disk array) and PERC H800 External Adapter for MD1200 (external disk array). If you have a PERC 6/E, you can connect it to an external MD1000 disk array module. However MD1000 may be discontinued in some countries.

Server Configuration

One of the most important factors in determining backup and restore performance is the disk performance of the server. You should consider using:

  • A separate local drive for each individual AhsayCBS instance's user home.
  • A separate local drive for AhsayCBS system home.
It is not recommended to use the OS partition or drive as the AhsayCBS system or user home. If the OS partition runs out of space, this will cause your OS to become unstable and may even crash your AhsayCBS server.

Expose only TCP Ports 80 and 443 to the Public

It is recommended to expose only TCP ports 80 and 443 to the public on your firewall. Please consult the user's manual of your firewall for more information on how to do so.

Restricting Access on Administration Panel

For security reasons, we would recommend that the Administration Panel of AhsayCBS must be hidden from public access, i.e. it should be exposed to local area network only.

File System Tuning

In order to ensure optimal performance from a server file system, please ensure that you do the following:

  1. Use local drives instead of network drives, i.e. iSCSI, NFS, SAMBA, etc.

  2. Tune your file system. For example, for NTFS, run the following: 

    fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1
fsutil behavior set mftzone 2
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
2fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2
  3. Turn off drive indexing feature for each system and user home drive(s). On MS Windows OS this is used for faster searching.

Virus Software

If you have anti-virus software installed on your server, please make sure the user home and system home drives are excluded from scanning, as this may interfere with normal AhsayCBS operation.

Network Load Balancing Configuration

For server which are configured with network load balancing, i.e. a dual WAN router or Round Robin routing. A static route should be configured for your AhsayCBS server connection to the Ahsay license server (lic.ahsay.com). This will ensure the remote IP address sent by AhsayCBS to the Ahsay license server will remain the same during daily routine license checks. This will avoid potential license errors, i.e. 1011 or 1012 license errors which could result to the automatic shutdown of your AhsayCBS service.

Other AhsayCBS Settings

All other settings such as Java heap size, QPS settings, scheduling backup jobs, replication, SSL certificate, API or other AhsayCBS settings can generally follow the instructions in the AhsayCBS Administration page.

Documentation