Personality Next Generation Operating Environment. Last updated: Mar-2015

Transcription

1 Personality Next Generation Operating Environment Last updated: Mar-2015

2 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION... 3 OPERATING ENVIRONMENT... 3 Technology... 3 Supported Hardware Platforms... 4 Virtual Environments... 4 VMWare and Oracle... 4 Oracle VM... 4 DATABASE SERVER... 5 APPLICATION SERVER... 6 USER INTERFACE... 7 Administration UI... 7 Self Service UI... 7 REPORTING... 8 Windward Reports (Standard Reports)... 8 Logi Info and Info Go (BI and Ad Hoc Reporting)... 8 Org Publisher (Organization Charts)... 8 Oracle s Business Intelligence (Legacy Reports and Ad Hoc Reporting)... 8 SAMPLE IMPLEMENTATION MODEL

3 INTRODUCTION This document is published as a starting point to aid in determining the required hardware environment for running the Personality software. It is not intended to provide an all-encompassing directive, as the setup and usage of the software varies immensely from one organization to the next. These are suggested minimums based on High Line s experience and customer feedback. Client requirements may vary from the suggested configurations, which are mainly based on stand-alone servers. For example: organizations using SANs for storage will not require much hard disk space on the actual database server itself. In this document, hardware requirements are subset by the number of in the organization, however, peak usage is of key importance to determining the required environment. For example: if 2,000 will access Self Service timesheets at 5:00 pm, then appropriate equipment will be required to handle that type of load, versus an environment with fewer than 10 accessing Self Service at any one time. In the charts in this document The number of refers to the total number of Employee records being kept in the system - whether active or not. The amount of memory noted is the amount of memory available on the server to be allocated to the application, not the total amount of memory on the server. More memory may be required to be allocated to an application instance if running large Windward-based reports on that server. For example, running a detailed employee profile report for a 10,000- employee population could take approximately 5G of the available RAM to load and process. Note: this is an unusual circumstance but is provided as an example. CPU refers to the number of cores expected to be allocated in today s servers which are typically virtualized. The number of cores will have a dramatic effect; the more accessors at peak periods, the more CPU cores required to handle the throughput and/or load balancing instances. OPERATING ENVIRONMENT High Line supports our product, and the technologies that are licensed through us to support our product. High Line does not support operating environments/networks. Technology Personality takes full advantage of Oracle s web-based technologies on a variety of platforms. The Oracle database server and WebLogic server provide High Line with a robust technological framework upon which to build applications. Through the use of the Oracle tools and compliance with our application development standards, High Line has the ability to offer Personality in a web-deployed Java Swing environment for the administrative user interface and a browser based self-service model. 3

4 Supported Hardware Platforms Personality will run with the Oracle database on any Oracle Tier 1 platform; a Windows 64 bit or Linux 64 bit OS is recommended. See the Oracle website for certifications of specific OS versions. Personality utilizes the Oracle WebLogic server on the following platforms: Windows 64-bit Servers Linux 64-bit Servers The Java Swing client will run on the following client platforms: Windows 7/8 Linux (limited support) Virtual Environments The Personality product may be used in a virtual environment. Due to the variable options possible with virtual environments, if technical issues cannot be resolved within the virtual environment, clients are required to reproduce the issue in a physical environment. VMWare and Oracle VMWare is considered a soft partition by Oracle and thus the Oracle Licensing must be based on the physical server sockets. For example, if there are 4 occupied CPU sockets on the physical server (even if only 1 is allocated to the virtual environment), Oracle requires that the 4 physical sockets are individually licensed. Optionally in the scenario above, if the 4 CPU sockets are divided into 4 virtual servers (1 socket for each), the software can be installed into all 4 virtual servers without violating the license agreement, if properly licensed. For clarity, High Line has re-produced an Oracle Metalink note ( ) below: Oracle provides support of the Oracle Stack when running on a VMware virtual machine in the following manner. If a problem arises and it is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution. If that solution does not work, the issue will be referred back to VMware for support. If the problem is determined to be an unknown Oracle issue when running on a VMware virtual machine, and the issue cannot be reproduced on a physical system by Oracle support, the issue will be referred back to VMware for support. Oracle and VMware have in place a joint customer support agreement to enable customer support issues to be transferred between the two partners. In addition, all versions of RAC are not supported on VMWare by Oracle. Oracle VM Oracle has its own Virtual Machine software which can be set with hard partitions for usage and licensing purposes. 4

5 DATABASE SERVER The Oracle Database Server is required for all installations. For most installations, Standard Edition One will suffice; Standard or Enterprise Editions are optional. Personality is currently certified with the Oracle 12c database server (current installs: version 12.1). The database comes with full archiving and backup facilities which eliminate unplanned downtime. The database server holds internal database structures, client-specific data and the application s stored procedures. The Personality user interface software resides external to the database. High Line recommends that all clients have a minimum of two database instances - one for PILOT testing and the other for PRODUCTION. During implementation you may have others such as a CONVERSION and/or TRAINING instance. Sample operating systems that can be used for the Database Server are shown below. versions should be confirmed for certification on the Oracle website. Specific OS Operating System Windows based Windows 2008 Server Windows 2012 Server Unix based Linux (check version against Oracle site) HP-UX AIX Sun Solaris Database Server Minimums: Employee Count (Active + Inactive) Up to 2,000 Up to 5,000 Up to 10,000 Over 10,000 CPU Cores Memory 4 GB 8 GB 16 GB 32 GB+ Hard Disk 3 X 30 GB 3 X 60 GB 3 X 90 GB 3 X 120 GB Note 1: A large amount of memory on the production machine will give the best performance. Note 2: These minimums are the amount to be allocated to the database, not to the server on whole. Note 3: CPU clock speeds can vary immensely and have a great effect on overall through-put; however High Line does not make recommendations at this level as they are always changing. Rather, we have made recommendations for number of CPU cores to ensure enough processing can be done simultaneously to ensure high performance. Note 4: On an initial installation, each database may take up to 5G.Thus, if a TRAINING, PILOT, and CONVERSION database are in place, the total would be ~15G. 5

6 APPLICATION SERVER The Oracle WebLogic Server 12c is required for all installations. Edition will suffice; Enterprise Editions and Suite are optional. For most installations the Standard The latest release of Personality is certified with Oracle WebLogic ; the application server must be on a separate server from the database. The operating system requires a 64-bit version of Windows or Linux see Oracle s website for certifications of specific versions. Application Server Minimums: Employee count (Active + Inactive) Up to 2,000 Up to 5,000 Up to 10,000 Over 10,000 CPU Cores Memory 8 GB+ 16 GB+ 24 GB+ 32 GB+ Notes At these levels there should be at multiple deployments configured for load balancing Hard Disk ~3 GB for Oracle10g AS alone (on one drive) Network Fiber between AS and DB, 100Base-T Minimum for Professional usage, and Cable or DSL minimum recommended for SS access Browser Industry Standard Browsers that support HTML5 can be used Note that every version of each browser has not been fully tested against all versions of the application. Note 1: A large amount of memory on the production machine will give the best performance. Note 2: These minimums are the amount to be allocated to a deployment instance, not to the server on whole. Note 3: CPU clock speeds can vary immensely and have a great effect on overall through-put; however High Line does not make recommendations at this level as they are always changing. Rather, we have made recommendations for number of CPU cores to ensure enough processing can be done simultaneously to ensure high performance. Note 4: These minimums assume that Personality is the only application active on this server and will vary greatly depending on the expected peak volumes. A good starting point for an estimate: add 1G of RAM for every 100 users at peak volumes. 6

7 USER INTERFACE Administration UI The Personality administration user interface uses a Java Swing environment to present a rich, robust and full-featured interface experience. Users can run the full Personality application from a browser, or from a desktop icon. The Client computer requires a version of Java runtime engine (version 1.8), and a browser. No other component is required; the Java runtime engine can be automatically downloaded through Java Webstart at runtime (no preinstallation required). Client Computer Minimums: CPU Relatively current processor Memory Minimum 512 MB allocated via JNLP. Hard Disk 16 MB required for JRE. 1.8 Network 100Base-T or higher for best experience Operating System Current Windows or Linux-based Self Service UI Personality Self Service modules are optional. Client computer requirements are much lighter for Self Service than for the Admin Interface. Client Computer Minimums: Memory: 10MB available memory under normal work conditions before using Self Service. Security: the Operating System and the version of web browser should be relatively current, and updated with the latest security patches. Browsers: Current IE/Firefox/Chrome or other HTML-5 compatible browsers (as noted in the Application Server section) are supported; higher CPU and higher network bandwidth will give the user a quicker response time. 7

8 REPORTING Windward Reports (Standard Reports) Personality utilizes Windward Reports for standard reporting requirements. High Line provides direct integration with this toolset and the information is fed to it via the business engine rather than straight from the database. Windward uses a template in a DOCX or XLSX format to produce the reports, making them easy to customize using MS Word/Excel and the Windward plug-in called AutoTag. Windward can also be utilized to create extract files to be sent to third party systems or spreadsheets for further manipulation. The Windward reports integration runs in the same environment as the business engine; this must be considered when allocating memory for the system. The more data and larger the report, the more instance memory required for completion. The same holds true for processing power. Logi Info and Info Go (BI and Ad Hoc Reporting) The Logi Info and Info Go products are licensed in one bundle. They have minimal requirements and have one deployment per database. The currently shipping version is 11. Org Publisher (Organization Charts) The Org Publisher and Org Publisher Premium products are licensed for a single computer. On a desktop computer, one person is authorized to create org charts (known as the administrator) and publish the charts for others to view/use. If installed as a web server, there may be up to 5 administrators allocated to its use. These products require a Microsoft Windows environment and for Web Server deployment require Microsoft IIS. Oracle s Business Intelligence (Legacy Reports and Ad Hoc Reporting) The Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Standard Edition product contains the Oracle Reports Server and the Oracle Discoverer engine. This is an optional reporting toolset, which can include Discoverer End User reporting. As Personality s former reporting tool there is a large base of Oracle reports that are still available but these are no longer applicable for enhancement. Oracle BI can be installed on the same server as the Application Server or on a separate server; however, to use the High Line supplied Oracle Reports, BI must be installed on a Windows Operating System. The latest release of Personality is certified with Oracle 11g for the BI. A minimum of 1GB of RAM is required to be allocated to Oracle BI; the overall configuration must be scaled for the number of concurrent users/reports to be completed. Memory and processing power are key for a high performance system. Specific requirements depend on the amount of data and size of the 8

9 report to be generated. The BI tool requires processing at the database tier, therefore use of this tool must be considered for DB server sizing. This product has been discontinued by Oracle. The Oracle Reports Services can be licensed separately and the BI Publisher product now replaces the Oracle Discoverer product. 9

10 SAMPLE IMPLEMENTATION MODEL Below is a sample implementation model diagrams reflecting different environmental structures that are possible with Personality. 10