2.0 Deploying Filr as a Single Appliance

IMPORTANT:The primary best practice for small Filr deployments is to ensure that a small deployment will meet your organization’s needs in the foreseeable future. A large percentage of past Filr support incidents come down to the simple fact that the service load was seriously underestimated. As a result, organizations have had to begin again with their deployments.

Novell strongly recommends that you thoroughly assess your organization’s needs before proceeding with a small deployment.

If you are certain that your organization’s file service load will never exceed the small deployment capacity limits outlined in Figure 1-1, then you can safely proceed with a small deployment as outlined in this section.

If you are not certain, complete the planning and other instructions in this guide, beginning with Section 3.0, Understanding Large Filr-Clustered Deployments, before proceeding.

This Best Practices Guide Focuses on Large Filr-Clustered Deployments

Setting up a single Filr appliance is straight-forward and well documented in the Filr online documentation. The following sections provide only an overview of the basic processes you need to follow, and include links into the online documentation.

Getting Started with Your Small Filr Deployment

The main processes involved in beginning a small deployment are illustrated and explained below.

Figure 2-1 A Small Deployment of Filr

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Details

Download and deploy the software for your chosen virtualization platform as instructed in Downloading the Filr Appliance and Configuring the Virtual Environment in the Novell Filr 1.0.1 Installation and Configuration Guide.

IMPORTANT:The Novell best practices recommendation is to configure a small deployment appliance with 4 CPUs and 12 GB memory.

Specify the appliance’s basic configuration, which includes administrative users’ passwords, IP address settings, and the time zone and NTP time source, as instructed in Installing the Filr Appliance in the Novell Filr 1.0.1 Installation and Configuration Guide.

These settings are common to all Novell appliances.

Setting Up Your Small Deployment

After your Filr appliance is running on the network, you need to configure it with settings for the users and groups, the files and folders that they will access, and the permissions that they need in order to utilize Filr.

Be sure to complete the instructions in the following sections in the Novell Filr 1.0.1 Installation and Configuration Guide: