System scaling

By default, the XProtect BYOL CloudFormation deploys all server components on a single EC2 instance. With the AWS cloud infrastructure, you can scale individual components across multiple instances and storages to meet the expanding performance and capacity needs of your VMS installation.

Not all components are needed in all installations. You can always add components later. Such components could be additional recording servers, failover recording servers or mobile servers for hosting and providing access to XProtect Mobile and XProtect Web Client.

The XProtect CloudFormation script deploys Microsoft SQL Server Express which is a free edition of SQL Server.

For very large systems or systems with many transactions to and from the SQL Server databases, Milestone recommends that you use the Microsoft® SQL Server® Standard or Microsoft® SQL Server® Enterprise edition of SQL Server on a dedicated computer on the network and on a dedicated hard disk drive that is not used for other purposes. Installing SQL Server on its own drive improves the entire system performance.

Depending on your hardware and configuration, systems with up to 18 cameras can run on a c5.large instance type, while larger instances such as g4dn.4xlarge can support up to 480 cameras. For systems with more than 500 cameras, Milestone recommends that you use second-level scaling of dedicated EC2 instances and storage for all or some of the components.

Scaling can be done on the same VPC as on the original deployment, in a different region or availability zone, or to physical servers on your on-premises environment.