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Defining a Test and Transition Plan for the Siebel Deployment

Defining a test plan to verify that the proposed deployment infrastructure functions correctly and is sized correctly is critically important. Equally important is defining a plan that transitions the Siebel deployment to production.

This topic is a step in Process of Infrastructure Planning.

Observe the following best-practices guidelines for testing the Siebel deployment and transitioning it to production.

• Separate production environment. Keep the development and test environments physically separate from the production environment. Development and test activities should never be conducted on the production Siebel Database and preferably not on the production database server.
• Server stress testing. Test Siebel Enterprise Server performance under average and peak workloads. Siebel Expert Services finds that performance problems at customer sites are frequently caused by the following things:
  • Servers were tested at much less than average or peak workloads. This prevents configuration and tuning problems from being uncovered.
  • Siebel Server components are either incorrectly distributed across servers or are not configured correctly.
  • The load balancing strategy is ineffective under typical workloads. This can be caused by stress testing the servers with a workload that has characteristics different than the production environment.
• Failover and Resiliency Testing. Define a test plan that evaluates the effect of server component failures. Undetected single points of failure within the Siebel deployment is a common problem found during implementation readiness reviews by Siebel Expert Services.

  Define a server cluster test plan that evaluates failover behaviors. Run the test plan under average and peak workloads. It is particularly important to verify that failover performance under peak workloads is acceptable.

• Database Server Testing. Define a test plan that evaluates the following:
  • OLTP performance under average and peak workloads.
  • Database server platform failover. Typically the database server is clustered.
  • Recovery from database corruption. Recovery mechanisms are typically provided by the database vendor.
  • Batch processing support. Verify that the database server correctly handles batch jobs from servers as well as synchronization requests from Siebel Remote.
  • Web Client users. Verify that batch jobs do not degrade transaction processing performance and are completed in a timely fashion.