Hardware Guidelines for Environments with Multiple Servers

Note: This content is no longer updated. For the latest content, please go to the user guide for M-Files Online. For information on the supported product versions, refer to our lifecycle policy.

For environments with a large number of objects and users, we recommend to have separate dedicated server machines for the M-Files Server application, the vault database, and full-text search indexing. For better scalability and availability, it is also possible to have multiple application, vault database, and full-text search indexing servers.

In Multi-Server Mode environments, each application server must have hardware that meet the server requirements.

Important: The configurations that this section gives are examples only. There are many things that have an effect on the system performance. For example, the degree of concurrent activity and the type of operations that users do in the vault.

The disk space requirements for the metadata database are dependent on the complexity of the metadata structure and the number of object versions in the database. You can use the estimates of this section in typical document management use cases.

In large M-Files implementations, contact M-Files to help you with the implementation plan.

Environments with up to one million objects when Microsoft SQL Server is on a separate server

We recommend to have a separate SSD drive for indexing on the M-Files Server. In this example, file data is stored on the application server.


System component	Database server	Application server
CPU	8 cores	8 cores
Memory	32 GB	16 GB
Storage	2 TB SSD drive	10 TB in total (4 TB for files + 4 TB for indexing + 20% as a buffer)
Database management system	Microsoft SQL Server 2019 or later, Standard or Enterprise Edition

Environments with up to five million objects and five terabytes of files

Note: In these types of environments, configurations without a separate full-text search indexing server can be sufficient.


System component	Database server	Application server	Full-text search indexing (distributed IDOL installation on 1 server)
CPU	16 cores	8 cores	8 cores
Memory	32 GB	16 to 32 GB	16 to 32 GB
Storage	256 GB SSD drive for operating system SSD disks for database data and database transaction log Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD drive for operating system 15 TB HDD for file data. The file storage can be attached to the application server or the application server can connect to a separate file server. Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 256 GB HDD/SSD disks for IDOL installations: 1 disk for DIH/DAH engine 1 disk for daily index content engine 5 disks for main index content engines Use RAID 1 or similar
Operating system	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019
Database management system	Microsoft SQL Server 2019 or later, Standard or Enterprise Edition

Environments with up to 15 million objects and 8 terabytes of files


System component	Database server	Application server	The full-text search indexing (distributed IDOL installation on 3 servers)
System component	Database server	Application server	Frontend server	2 backend servers
CPU	32 cores	16 cores	8 cores	16 cores per server
Memory	128 GB	32 GB	128 GB	128 GB per server
Storage	256 GB SSD disk for operating system Two 512 GB SSD disks for database data Two 128 GB SSD disks for database transaction log Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 25 TB HDD for file data. The file storage can be attached to the application server or the application server can connect to a separate file server. Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 256 GB HDD/SSD disks for IDOL installations: 1 disk for DIH/DAH engine 1 disk for daily index content engine Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 256 GB HDD/SSD disks for IDOL installations: 10 disks for main index content engines Use RAID 1 or similar
Operating system	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019
Database management system	Microsoft SQL Server 2019 or later, Standard or Enterprise Edition

Environments with up to 50 million objects and 10 terabytes of files


System component	Database server	Application server	The full-text search indexing (distributed IDOL installation on 6 servers)
System component	Database server	Application server	Frontend server	5 backend servers
CPU	32 cores	16 cores	8 cores	16 cores per server
Memory	512 GB	64 GB	128 GB	128 GB per server
Storage	256 GB SSD disk for operating system Two 1 TB SSD disks for database data Two 256 GB SSD disks for database transaction logs Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 30 TB HDD for file data. The file storage can be attached to the application server or the application server can connect to a separate file server. Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 256 GB HDD/SSD disks for IDOL installations: 1 disk for DIH/DAH engine 1 disk for daily index content engine Use RAID 1 or similar	256 GB SSD disk for operating system 256 GB HDD/SSD disks for IDOL installations: 10 disks for main index content engines Use RAID 1 or similar
Operating system	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019	Microsoft Windows Server 2019
Database management system	Microsoft SQL Server 2019 or later, Standard or Enterprise Edition