You’ve all been asking for it, and now we have produced it… some UAG DirectAccess performance information. The article contains more detailed information about the number of users supported on the hardware and additional caveats.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, we’ve got the main numbers below, and some important points to note:

1. The hardware requirements for servers running Forefront UAG DirectAccess vary, and are dependent on the number of concurrent users and the Forefront UAG DirectAccess configuration.

2. In any scenario, the number of concurrent users that can connect to the Forefront UAG DirectAccess server are reduced by using:

  • Smart card authentication.
  • Network Access Protection (NAP).
  • More infrastructure servers.

3. The numbers in the table below were based on simulated DirectAccess client connections, with a certain upload/download ratio, and a set amount of time to be connected before disconnecting.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, here are the numbers:

Table 1: Forefront UAG DirectAccess server performance and hardware requirements for common deployment scenarios

Default Forefront UAG DirectAccess Deployment

Forefront UAG DirectAccess - Management Only

Users

2300

4000

CPU

2 quad-core processors

For example, 2 Intel Xeon L5520, 2.26 GHz with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology enabled

2 quad-core processors

For example, 2 Intel Xeon L5520, 2.26 GHz with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology enabled

Memory - GB

16

16

Network Interface

Gigabit Ethernet with Receive Side Scaling Queue capability

Gigabit Ethernet with Receive Side Scaling Queue capability

Author

James Kilner, Technical Writer – Forefront UAG

Reviewers

Tom Shinder, Technical Writer – Forefront UAG

Ben Bernstein, Senior Program Manager – Forefront UAG