4372ch06.fm | Draft Document for Review November 15, 2007 3:27 pm |
6.1 Large environment considerations
The target organization for our enterprise design is a growing point-of-sale organization based in multiple locations including stores, warehouses and a central IT location. Each facility has between 50 and 100 point-of-sale devices and 4 to 10 servers. The organization want the implementation to be global in nature, for example a central database for the deployment history and inventory. A central database also provides backup server capability. As is IT best practice, the organization wants the design to include a test facitliy for the creation and testing of profiles and packages. The test facility will include a development environment and a pre-production environment. This environment will allow for the capture and testing of profiles, deployment schemes, and the export/import process between environments. The following are the high-level requirements of the system:
To develop a low-risk methodology of rolling out the new POS systems
To reduce the cost and complexity of rebuilding a POS system
To make the rebuild process no touch
6.1.1Managing development and production environments
Below are some definitions for three typical types of environments in an enterprise IT infrastructure.
Test environment
The test facility is being installed as two separate systems. First the development environment, then the pre-production environment. Both of these environments are linked by a physical network and processes to migrate profiles from test to pre-production.
Pre-production environment
The pre-production environment is a representative subset of the production environment. It consists of a master server, a slave server and where possible one of each production target systems. Depending on the actual production topology it may be prudent to incorporate a simulated or real slow network link between the master and slave servers.
Production environment
The production environment, shows five sites sharing the one RDBMS with the central IT location acting as the master. The master server hosts the RDBMS for the implementation and is a dedicated server. The four slave servers represent
126Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment in a Retail Environment
