Multiple Machines in FMS deployment?

[eswanborg]

We have historically run FMSA on Windows servers. Over the past year we've built a few solutions that use Supercontainer. It wasn't until after the solutions were up and running that we discovered SC on a Windows box has some limitations.

What we were able to work out with our IT group was getting a Mac server (running Lion desktop, not Lion Server) to handle the WPE and SC duties for our main FMSA machine that was still Windows (Server 2008 r2).

On the surface things work OK. However, we've noticed a few oddities that I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on:

1 - IWP users seem to have an extended delay when logging into a database now. It's been a little while since we made the switch so I can't quantify the difference, but I too have noticed at least the perception that there is now a delay when using IWP. Could there be communication issues between the two servers that's adding to this login time?

2 - IWP users are routinely logged out after 15 minutes. In the admin console the logout time is set to 60 minutes (the max), but I can verify that it does log users out after 15. I know that the default logout time is 15 minutes, but when installing the FMSA software on the Mac server for WPE components, there is nothing to configure. Has anyone else seen this? Any suggestions as to how we could make the setting in the Admin console of the Windows server actually stick for the IWP users connecting via the Mac server?

3 - This is more a SC question but I'll ask anyway - the new Mac server is running Lion. We know there are issues with SC versions, so we've upgraded to v2.83 which should solve some of those thumbnail generation problems. However, what we've seen is that our Mac clients are now presented with the HTML version of SC, but any PC clients that had the older plugin installed, still get the Java version - is that expected? Are there problems with using the Java on PC, knowing that SC server (in standalone mode) on the Mac is generally now the new HTML version?

We've had enough problems that we may look to roll the Mac server back to Snow Leopard and stick with the older SC version - however that still doesn't answer the questions of the IWP problems we've seen.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

eric