The one thing I love most about my team here is the variety in our skill set, if you know me you know that I am not a developer or a network engineer, but I do know many of them, and many of them are in the office with me. Over the last couple of weeks while we have been refining our business requirements, we have also started designing the technical infrastructure on which CS10 will sit. So for those of you with a technical mindset, here are some of the things we have been up to.
First of all, we started with a look at what our infrastructure currently looks like, and whether we need to make any changes going forward. The good news is that we didnt need to buy any new hardware, except some additional RAM for our servers and a couple of additional NICs (we are intending to assign a NIC to each virtual server) and so the conversation continued by saying “Why have separate servers when virtual works”. Our CS10 implementation is based on a virtual environment largely due to the manageability and scalability virtualisation technology offers. This is also in line with our internal IT Strategy and leverages the existing investment in resources, personnel and training that we have already made. This will be change number 1 from our eDOCS environment.
We have been lucky to have our technical resources and our CS10 specialists working very closely to get it right first time and the points below represent a few pointers from them; these arent necessary CS10 specific areas either, but choosing to 'go virtual' does have some implications for the environment so:
With virtualisation you need to decide on the platform you are comfortable with, there are 3 main players in this space: VMWare, MS Hyper-V and Citrix Xen.
We have used Hyper-V for the benefits that comes with using Windows Enterprise R2. You can install the Hyper-V role and install up to 4 x Windows 2k8R2 OS. The price of an Enterprise license used like this makes sense. The caveat however is that you cannot have 2 servers on the host and another 2 on another physical box.
We have also decided to start with the following rather slim architecture:
• 1 SQL 2008 SP2 (64-bit) Server
• 1 Open Text Content Server 10 Administration Server
• 1 Open Text Content Server 10 Content/Front end Server
• 1 SharePoint 2010 Server (CS10 integrates smoothly with SP2010 and we will be working on this more next year)
Once you have built base servers, you need to consider what accounts and permissions you will need for SQL, Content Server or SharePoint. Remember separation of roles needs to be considered.
One of the things that the team is really pleased with is the ease of scalability of CS10, we have started small, and as with all things CS10 we can add as we need to add; be that infrastructure, or functionality as we grow and as our needs evolve.
So right now, the hardware has been built, software is installed and is currently being configured to meet our needs
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