Best Deployment Option with 2 Servers

[jguevin]

I have 2 similar servers at my disposal for installing 8.4.  Can anyone chime in on the best deployment as far as the 3 tiers (Gateway, Application Tier, Content Mgr).  What configuration would give me the best performance?  Should I have all 3 on one server and then the App Tier on the other?

thanks
Jeff

[josepherwin]

Depends on your situation and preference.

A Cognos Consultant once advise me that if this is a Production environment, then you should have a full failover situation (for example, you can still run Cognos even if 1 server is out of service)

Since you only have 2 boxes, then the ideal situation would be to install ALL Cognos Apps (Content Manager, Web Server, Application) in both of the server. It may not give you performance (depends on the hardware spec of the box), but it will definitely provide you with more reliability.

[jguevin]

Thanks for the response.  Do you know which tier actually uses the most resources?

[josepherwin]

App server should be the one with higher spec.

However, you will need to keep monitor the environment to ensure that the other components have been properly configured.

[jguevin]

Here's the case: in production we have all components on 1 server, until now things were fine.  As we have grown and the number of users and requests has increased to a point where things are noticeably slower.  I thought by utilizing another App tier on a new server performance would increase.

So I went ahead installed just the Application tier on a new server.  I also went through configuration mgr and changed the Gateway URI setting and Content Mgr URI setting to point to the production box.
Also had to add a database connection in the Notification store.

Started services on new server.  Went to Admin tool in production and saw new server as a registered dispatcher but it showed as "partially available".  Then out of nowhere reports we had scheduled to run in production started to run.  The reports scheduled to run were scheduled o other days and times.  Its like it went through the list of all scheduled reports regardless of their actual schedule and started running them.  Also all the reports failed.  Anyone have any idea what I am missing to get this additional app tier machine working properly?

Thanks
Jeff

[sreddyy]

Hi,

I guess you have dispatcher on 2nd server and you should register this dispatcher with gateway on server1 and hope your 2nd server is using gateway and CM of server1.

Thanks,
Sr

[jguevin]

Should I be setting the Notification Store property on the 2nd App Tier server to point at my current content store?