Bookshelf v7.5: Planning the Topology of Your Siebel Deployment

Siebel Server Installation Guide for Microsoft Windows > Preparing for the Installation > Planning Your Siebel Deployment >

Planning the Topology of Your Siebel Deployment

The topology of your Siebel deployment—the number, type, and capacity of your computers, and the distribution of Siebel components across them—will vary considerably depending on the number and type of Siebel clients that you are deploying.

The following guidelines apply to all deployments:

A Siebel Enterprise Server can be a mixture of Windows and UNIX machines. For more information, see System Requirements and Supported Platforms.

Give each Siebel Server its own dedicated machine. While you can install all the Siebel components—the Siebel Database Server, Siebel File System, Siebel Gateway Name Server, and Siebel Server—on a single computer, the Siebel architecture is expressly designed to scale by distributing these components across multiple machines. For optimum performance, install each Siebel Server on a dedicated machine.

Give the Siebel Database Server its own high-performance machine. Your RDBMS must be sized appropriately for your deployment. For information on sizing and tuning your RDBMS for optimum performance, see the documentation provided by your RDBMS vendor.

Install sufficient Siebel Servers for your deployment. The more Siebel Servers you install, the better the distribution of the workload among them when you must support large numbers of Siebel Server components and users.

Use Central Dispatch to balance requests for server components across multiple Siebel Servers. For information about installing Central Dispatch, see Implementing Load-Balancing with Central Dispatch.

Clustering technology and the connection-brokering features of Central Dispatch address different operational requirements, and must each be deployed on independent nodes in an Enterprise. You must plan your deployment carefully to take advantage of the benefits of each technology.

Clustering provides failover capability. It does not provide facilities for distributing requests among multiple resources as does Central Dispatch because a given resource can execute on only one cluster node at a time. Therefore, clustering does not support load-balancing across cluster nodes.

Central Dispatch provides load-balancing and connection brokering. It also provides failover capability for the load-balanced components if each server in the Central Dispatch site is sized and configured sufficiently. However, Central Dispatch does not provide failover capability for components that cannot be load-balanced.

For example, consider a Central Dispatch site with five load-balanced servers. To handle a failure on one of the five servers, the other four servers must be able to handle the combined maximum load that all five servers might expect. Therefore, each server should be sufficiently sized and configured to handle 125% of its expected maximum load when all five servers are up. To handle a failure on two servers, each of the five servers must be sized and configured to handle 167% of the expected maximum load when all five servers are up.

For more information about the use of Central Dispatch for load-balancing, see Implementing Load-Balancing with Central Dispatch. For more information about clustering servers, see Clustering Your Siebel Deployment for Failover the vendor documentation for your operating system, and SupportWeb.

Connect the computers on which your Siebel applications will run to fast LANs. Siebel Servers require high-speed local area network (LAN) connectivity. Siebel Systems strongly recommends an FDDI, Gigabit Ethernet, or other high-speed LAN to connect the Name Server, Central Dispatch Scheduler, Siebel Servers, and Siebel Database Server.

The Name Server can coexist with a Siebel Server or can be installed on another physical machine (or node). The only precondition is that the Name Server meet the hardware, operating system, and other requirements detailed in System Requirements and Supported Platforms. There is always only one Name Server communicating with multiple Siebel Servers. You can, however, have multiple Siebel Enterprise Servers.