Mitrefinch. Infrastructure Requirements

Transcription

1 Mitrefinch Infrastructure Requirements

2 Contents 1. Introduction Infrastructure requirements File Server Web Server Database Server Mitrefinch Processor/Polling machine Example scenarios

3 1. Introduction This document is intended to provide an explanation of the infrastructure requirements for the correct installation of a Mitrefinch system. It only covers the requirements for running the Windows TMS application as well as the Mitrefinch Silverlight (web application). It does not cover the satellite products i.e. PC Terminal.NET, Mobile clocking devices, etc Infrastructure requirements Fundamentally, the Mitrefinch TMS system requires the following platforms to be in place: File Server (required to store the application files and TMS data directory) Web Server(s) (required to host the Mitrefinch web-site) Database Server(s) (required to host the relational database i.e. MSSQL or ORACLE) Mitrefinch Processor/Polling machine(s) (required to communicate with the Mitrefinch clocking devices as well as run the overnight Processing tasks) Depending upon the size and scope of the installation, these roles can be shared across a single machine or separated onto 2 or more machines File Server The File Server hosts the Mitrefinch application files but does not itself perform any system processing. Therefore, the only requirements (from a Mitrefinch standpoint) for this server is hard disk space. However, the server operating system has its own requirements which are shown below: Minimum for Windows Server 2008 R2 Recommended for Windows Server 2008 R2 Processor 1.4 GHz (x86-64 processor) or Intel Itanium 2 2 GHz or faster Memory 512 MB RAM Recommended: 2 GB RAM or greater Maximum: 8 GB (Foundation) or 32 GB (Standard) or 2 TB (Enterprise, Datacenter, and Itanium-Based 3

4 Systems) Video adapter and monitor Super VGA (800 x 600) Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher resolution Hard drive disk free space Web Server 32 GB or greater for editions other than Foundation Foundation: 10 GB or more Computers with more than 16 GB of RAM require more disk space for paging, hibernation, and dump files Recommended: 40 GB or greater The Mitrefinch TMS software only runs on Microsoft IIS which has to be hosted on a Microsoft Server, the recommended Server is Windows Server 2008 so the requirements above are valid for the IIS Server. In very, very large scale (VLSS) systems, it may be necessary depending upon the scope and size of the system to spread the Web server across CPUs (Web Garden) or machines (Web Farm). This should only be considered if the speed of the single server solution is not sufficient for the scale of the installation. The Mitrefinch Web Application fully supports the use of either/or a Web Garden or Web Farm Database Server The Mitrefinch TMS software supports 2 database technologies, namely Microsoft SQL Server and ORACLE. Mitrefinch do not recommended a particular database technology but this decision should be made in conjunction with the company s current IT infrastructure. For those companies without any database technology currently in place, Mitrefinch recommended the use of Microsoft SQL Express 2008 Express which is a free version that can support databases of up to 10Gb in size. This size should be able to support a medium sized organisation (500 employees) utilising TMS. As a rough guide, it is estimated at the hard disk space requirements for the Mitrefinch TMS database is approximately 2Kb per employee per day. Microsoft SQL Server The current requirements for installing SQL Server 2012 can be found at: 4

5 Outside SQL Express, Mitrefinch only requires the basic version of SQL Server (Business Intelligence) but the companies own policies and infrastructure may force a higher version of SQL Server (Enterprise or Data Center), all versions of SQL Server (whether 32 or 64-bit are fully supported). ORACLE The current requirements for installing ORACLE can be found at: In a similar way to the Web server, it may be necessary to spread the load of the database servers across several machines (clustering). Clustering works independently of the Mitrefinch TMS application as it works at the database level. If this solution is required then it is advised that suitably qualified Database Administrators (DBAs) are utilised as Mitrefinch have no practical experience of this solution Mitrefinch Processor/Polling machine The Polling PC is the machine on which the Mitrefinch Polling program will be run. This program is an interface by which the clocking terminals and / or access units communicate with the main TMS / Access control database. This is a two-way interface, which involves employee clocking and access transactions being recovered from the terminals and written to the database, and employee details and access rights downloaded from the database to the terminals and units. It also performs other ancillary tasks such as synchronising the terminals with the correct time etc. To enable communication, the Polling PC must have either have a LAN/WAN connection (IP enabled terminals) or a serial port (serial terminals or FES system). The poller can either be run as an application (requiring the machine to be constantly logged on) or a Windows service (running in the background). With network terminals, it is possible to run more than one poller application/service on each server. This helps introduce communication redundancy and also allows the extensive tasks (specifically employee downloads) to be run concurrently. In VLSS systems, it may be necessary to have more than one physical/virtual polling machine in order to further aid concurrency and speed of the system. This decision should be considered based upon the number, type and location of the clocking terminals as well as the type of network and size of the installation. A second application/service, Processor, is usually run on the same PC. The purpose of this program is to convert the time & attendance transactions that the Poller has recovered from the terminals into processed hours within the database. Due to the scope of this application, it is considered that one Processor should be required for all installations but if speed becomes an issue then more than one processor can be installed on a server / separate machines in a similar way to the polling software. 5

6 2 Example scenarios Mitrefinch provide Microsoft Visio diagrams that contain example scenarios for the different sized systems. Fundamentally, the only difference between the different scenarios are the size and spread of the different servers. As the TMS system gets larger, different parts of the system are moved onto different servers. As a matter of note, currently, the largest TMS system that is installed (12,000 employees, 300+ terminals) is spread across 3 different servers: File Server / Web Server / Polling PC Database Server Polling PC / Processor PC i.e. even in this sitatuion, there has been no idea to extend the system into the very large sized scenario. Therefore, the very large scenario is a theoretical example that shows the potential of how the system could be separated in order to meet a very large scale installation. 6