BellHawk Windows Server Requirements

The BellHawk Software runs on a Microsoft Windows 2008 or later Server. It uses a Microsoft SQL Server database. For small installations this can be the free Express edition. The BellHawk software runs under control of the IIS Web Server which comes as part of the Windows Server operating system.

BellHawk will run on PC class computer (such as you would buy at Staples) but we do recommend the use of mirrored hard drives, as this is the major source of potential equipment failure. The hard drives tend to stay powered up for long periods of time in this application and after 3 to 5 years have a tendency to fail. The mirror (or higher level RAID) enables continued operation despite the failure until the defective drive can be replaced.

A dual core processor will work fine but for 20 or more devices and users a quad-core processor is recommended.

BellHawk can be run on a Virtual Machine but this should be given high processor priority and adequate memory resources to ensure rapid response to user data collection requests.

The BellHawk database rarely exceeds 10GBytes in size and the code is a few hundred MBytes in size.

We recommend the use of at least 4 GBytes of main memory, of which 2GBytes should be allocated to the IIS web server application pool and 2GBytes should be allocated to SQL Server. This will enable IIS to retain web pages and their code behind in working memory to speed response to users. It will also enable SQL Server to keep its commonly used database tables in memory for quick response.

Note that if the Express version of SQL Server is being used then its in-memory component is limited to 1 GByte.

The MilramX website can share the same resources as used by the Bell-Hawk website as its resource usage tends to be intermittent. The MilramX transfer function can consume significant resources when running, if large database searches and transfers are being performed. These can, however be scheduled to run at off-hours, if needed.

The average network bandwidth used by BellHawk tends to be low but a 10/100 Mbit Ethernet connection is recommended.