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4372ch06.fm Draft Document for Review November 15, 2007 3:27 pm
126 Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment in a Retail Environment
6.1 Large environment considerations
The target organization for our enterprise design is a growing point-of-sale
organization based in multiple locations including stores, warehouses and a
central IT location. Each facility has between 50 and 100 point-of-sale devices
and 4 to 10 servers. The organization want the implementation to be global in
nature, for example a central database for the deployment history and inventory.
A central database also provides backup server capability. As is IT best practice,
the organization wants the design to include a test facitliy for the creation and
testing of profiles and packages. The test facility will include a development
environment and a pre-production environment. This environment will allow for
the capture and testing of profiles, deployment schemes, and the export/import
process between environments. The following are the high-level requirements of
the system:
To develop a low-risk methodology of rolling out the new POS systems
To reduce the cost and complexity of rebuilding a POS system
To make the rebuild process no touch
6.1.1 Managing development and production environments
Below are some definitions for three typical types of environments in an
enterprise IT infrastructure.
Test environment
The test facility is being installed as two separate systems. First the development
environment, then the pre-production environment. Both of these environments
are linked by a physical network and processes to migrate profiles from test to
pre-production.
Pre-production environment
The pre-production environment is a representative subset of the production
environment. It consists of a master server, a slave server and where possible
one of each production target systems. Depending on the actual production
topology it may be prudent to incorporate a simulated or real slow network link
between the master and slave servers.
Production environment
The production environment, shows five sites sharing the one RDBMS with the
central IT location acting as the master. The master server hosts the RDBMS for
the implementation and is a dedicated server. The four slave servers represent