A.1 Before You Deploy an All-in-One Appliance

Unless you are deploying an all-in-one appliance as a test installation, make sure you understand the following before proceeding.

A.1.1 The Basic Difference Is Shared Storage

Multiple-appliance deployments involve shared storage; all-in-one deployments do not.

No Shared Storage

Shared Storage

  • One TeamWorks Appliance

  • No fault tolerance—Single Point of Failure

  • Not expandable beyond a single TeamWorks appliance

  • Multiple TeamWorks Appliances

  • Fault-tolerant TeamWorks services

  • Expandable by adding TeamWorks appliances, disk space, or RAM as needs increase

A.1.2 More Deployment-Type Details

As illustrated in Figure A-1, TeamWorks can be deployed in two different ways.

Table A-1 summarizes important comparison points.

Table A-1 Comparing Deployment Types

All-in-One

Multiple-Appliance

Best Practice Recommendation

Recommended for:

  • Proof of concept

  • Very small organizations with no growth anticipated

Recommended for all organizations unless a small deployment clearly meets all present and future needs.

Deployment Documentation

Creating an All-in-One Deployment in the GroupWise TeamWorks 18.2.1: Installation and Deployment Guide

This planning guide and the TeamWorks Installation and Upgrade Guide.

Deployment Size

One all-in-one appliance

  • At least two TeamWorks appliances for fault tolerance, three recommended as a best practice; one required.

  • Three Search appliances with two of them running the Messenging service.

  • Access to a PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL database, or one PostgreSQL appliance

Off-loading Processor-Intensive Functions

n/a

We recommend dedicating one TeamWorks appliance to only content synchronization and indexing.

Expansion to Accommodate Increased TeamWorks-Service Demands

n/a

In theory, you can add as many TeamWorks appliances as needed.

In practice, as with any system, there are limitations external to TeamWorks, such as network bandwidth, hardware limitations, and other constraints that, at some point, become bottlenecks for TeamWorks scalability and performance.

Micro Focus’ performance and scale test beds include up to 10 TeamWorks appliances.

Fault Tolerance

n/a

Multiple TeamWorks appliances provide continual service access

Search appliances are independent and redundant.

Three index servers are the recommendation for all deployments

High Availability

Single point of failure

With a load balancer deployed, two or more TeamWorks Appliances can be attached to the same shared storage, which in turn can be protected by traditional clustering.

Migration to a Multiple-appliance deployment

Not supported

Migration is supported.

User requests per second

It isn’t possible to define the number of users that a TeamWorks appliance can service.

In a lab setting, a single TeamWorks appliance accommodates 762 logged-in users making 42 requests per second with no performance degradation.

Load handling per TeamWorks appliance is the same as all-in-one deployments.

However, adding TeamWorks appliances expands the capabilities.

SQL Database

Integrated

Separate SQL database recommended.

PostgreSQL appliance available. It is designed only for dedicated TeamWorks use.