Designing Your Calendar Server Deployment

The deployment process consists of the following general phases, referred to as the Solution Life Cycle:

• Analyzing business requirements

• Analyzing technical requirements

• Designing the logical architecture

• Designing the deployment architecture

• Implementing the deployment

• Operating the deployment

The deployment phases are not rigid: the deployment process is iterative in nature.

Objectives of Your Calendar Server Deployment

Before you begin your Calendar Server deployment planning, a good question to ask is:

Why is my organization deploying Calendar Server?

Several reasons to consider are:

• Cost savings. The total cost of ownership per user is lower than using other calendar products on the market.

• Increased productivity. Your calendar users can manage their events and tasks as well as schedule meetings and appointments with others in the organization. Your users can also manage calendar groups and resources such as meeting rooms and equipment. They can also synchronize their calendars with mobile devices and Microsoft Outlook.

• Improved scalability and availability. Calendar Server scales both horizontally and vertically. If your organization grows, you can easily upgrade your configuration by upgrading a server or add more servers.

• High availability (HA) configuration. Integration with Sun Cluster software enables you to configure Calendar Server as a highly available service. If you experience a software or hardware failure, Calendar Server fails over to a secondary server.

Calendar Server Deployment Team

Deploying Calendar Server usually involves a number of people, each with different roles and responsibilities. In a small organization, one person might perform several roles. Some of the roles to consider are:

• Program Manager oversees the overall Calendar Server deployment and is responsible for its success or failure.

• Calendar Server Administrator performs day-to-day administrative tasks to manage Calendar Server and might also be responsible for installing and upgrading Calendar Server.

• Performance Engineer tests and monitors the Calendar Server performance for the trial and production deployments to see if the deployment criteria is met.

• Development Engineering writes Calendar Server applications or plugins, or customizes the Calendar Server user interface (UI), if required.

• Documentation Specialist writes any customized documentation for administrators and end users.

• Education/Training develops training classes and material.

• Support Specialists, who support both the trial and production deployments.

Calendar Server End Users

End users can connect to Calendar Server by using the Communications Express web client, or Sun Java System Connector for Microsoft Outlook.

Questions about end users at your site include:

• How many total Calendar Server end users will your site have?

• How will your end users connect to Calendar Server? Communications Express? Microsoft Outlook? A combination of both clients?

• How many geographic locations are involved? Are your end users all in the same or different time zones?

• Will your end users log into Calendar Server at the same time each day?

• How many active end users will your deployment have during peak use?

• How fast will your end user base grow?

• What are your specific performance requirements for Calendar Server end users?

• What are your single sign-on (SSO) requirements?

• Are any of your users migrating from an earlier version of Calendar Server?

• Are your end users planning to use Communications Sync Software?

• Does your site plan to use a proxy server?

• Does your site plan to use load balancing?

Expected Calendar Server End User Performance

What are your specific performance requirements for your end users? For example:

• What end user response times are acceptable?

• Can you tolerate a possible degradation in performance during peak load times?

What configuration do you plan to use for your deployment? Calendar Server configuration scenarios include:

• Single Calendar Server instance

• Single front-end server with single back-end database server

• Multiple front-end servers with multiple back-end database servers using LDAP CLD plugin

• Multiple front-end/back-end servers using LDAP CLD plugin

• High Availability (HA) configuration

If you plan to configure multiple front-end servers, how do you plan to distribute your end users?

If you plan to configure multiple back-end database servers, how do you plan to distribute your database? For example, you could distribute servers geographically.

What plans do you have for growth? For both front-end and back-end servers?