Comments on: LabVIEW 8.5 on a multi-user Windows 2003 Server

By: Tomi Maila

Tomi Maila — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:48:51 +0000

Ulrich, would you expect to run multiple instances of the same application simultaneously? Would the users running the application be with admin privileges, power users or with limited rights only? And what scenario do you exactly mean with using LV webserver in connection with IIS?

By: Ulrich Mok

Ulrich Mok — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:05:58 +0000

This is almost what I was looking for. However – since in our case we do not require LabView development, I was simply considering runing LV executables and the LV RunTime Environment. Does anybody have experience doing that on a Win20003 server?

Also – do you have any experince with using the LabView webserver in connection with IIS?

By: Gordon Wood

Gordon Wood — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:46:07 +0000

We’ve been using Labview on Windows 2003 Server for the past 4-5 years with essentially no issues. At one point, the NI Motion drivers wouldn’t install, but that was for only one version. Otherwise, everything we’ve used installs and works the same as on XP. We use NI-DAQ, NI-IMAQ, NI-VISA, NI Motion.

We only run one instance of Labview–under administrator privilege just to keep things easy. NI doesn’t officially support this OS, so it’s difficult to resolve any problems with drivers. But we’ve never had any reason to suspect that the driver or other behavior was different from XP.

By: Tomi Maila

Tomi Maila — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:51:40 +0000

John, I haven’t tested LabVIEW communication protocols on the Windows server environment so I cannot say anything about them. However, as Windows 2003 server mainly relies on exactly the same protocol stacks as Windows XP, I would expect the communication protocols to work without trouble. On the other hand, I wouldn’t rely on all the NI hardware drivers to work without problems. Hardware drivers may need to work directly in kernel space and I guess kernel environment is not identical in the server and the workstation Windows environments. I don’t know if this helped you at all…

By: John Lokanis

John Lokanis — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:59:13 +0000

If you only wish to use Win2003Server to allow LabVIEW to take advantage of more CPUs or greater than 4GB of RAM, would you still need to make the modification to at way LV is launched? (assuming only one user on the Win2K machine).

What about communication protocols used by LV? (LOGOS, etc.) Would these be supported in the Win2003Server environment?

Finally, it has been my experience that building you LV app into an exe can greatly improve it’s performance. You should consider this even though you are always changing you app. Especially if performance is a consideration.

By: Tomi Maila

Tomi Maila — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:18:51 +0000

We just had our first problem after using the system for a while without problems. There were two simultaneous LabVIEW instances running file conversion from a proprietary format to HDF5 as suddely everithing got meshed up. There was something wrong with the available system resources. We were not able to read or write a single data file. The system could not even load administrator profile. Reboot solved the problem. We have no clue what was going on. Before I rebooted there was more than 3GB of free memory, more than 2TB of free data disk and more than 200GB of free system disk. I was thinking of memory fragmentation or something related to file handles. However we are still unaware what happened.