Planning an Upgrade to Siebel 7 > Planning an Upgrade > Assessing the Current Siebel Environment >

Infrastructure Assessment

Analyze the existing infrastructure to determine whether it is sufficient for the Siebel 7 environment. Consider the characteristics of your infrastructure:

• Number of Siebel Servers required
• Number of Web servers required
• New architecture of the environment using these servers
• Security technologies, such as LDAP or ADSI
• Network architecture
• Total number of users
• Integration with other applications
• Future direction of the application

The Siebel 7 architecture offers several deployment options. The Smart Web Client architecture supports a zero-footprint deployment with the Business Object Layer centralized on the Siebel Server. As the user community expands, additional Siebel Servers or CPUs can be added to scale the deployment horizontally.

Conduct a performance and scalability test before going to production to establish the baseline characteristics of your implementation.

CAUTION:  A comprehensive sizing review by Siebel Expert Services is recommended to verify topology, configuration, and sizing assumptions for large deployments.

Sizing Review

An Expert Services sizing review will help deployments with more than 500 users to plan for the following large-deployment characteristics:

• Performance requirements of different Siebel applications may vary significantly. For example, the user community roles and responsibilities within the application framework vary. This will impact the sizing and configuration as a varying mix of modules and functionality will be required to achieve the desired business objectives.
• Users may be geographically dispersed. For example, Siebel Call Center users may be located in multiple geographic locations.
• Demands of one application might exceed those of other applications. For example, an organization using Siebel Analytics might add more users to the Siebel Analytics application than to other Siebel applications.
• Ancillary third-party applications might have their own sizing requirements. For example, heavy usage of reporting requires a separate server to deploy the Actuate eReporting Server and its components.
• Siebel eBusiness Applications may be integrated with other applications. ASiebel application might be integrated with another application by an integration server to read data to or write data from the Siebel eBusiness Application.
• Hardware may host multiple Siebel applications. For example, production deployments usually consist of the same hardware to host multiple Siebel applications and Siebel Servers.

A detailed sizing review provides guidelines for your implementation's hardware and database sizing, backup and recovery strategies, and database configuration. The results of a sizing review will help you with the following tasks:

• Sizing the database server and Siebel Server correctly for user and data growth.
• Sizing hardware for running server resources such as EIM, Workflow, or Assignment Manager.
• Sizing an environment for Analytics.
• Understanding Siebel architecture to determine how server components are used.
• Understanding capacity requirements for Siebel Remote and Replication.
• Verifying correct database configuration to prevent database degradation.
• Rectifying nonstandard or invalid server configurations.
• Determining the correct number of disks required to achieve the required RAID configuration.
• Understanding data integrity requirements for the Siebel Gateway, Siebel Server, and Siebel File System.
• Defining best practices to maintain database integrity specific to your organization's requirements.

To request a sizing review for your implementation, contact Siebel Expert Services or your Technical Account Manager (TAM). An Expert Services Sizing Review takes approximately two days. (An additional day is necessary to size an implementation that includes Siebel Analytics.) The product of a sizing review is a report of all findings and recommendations, and a follow-up conference call with the upgrade team and Siebel technical account manager.