Rational Asset Manager system and capacity planning guidelines
Performance factors
- Number of servers
- Processor speed
- Number of processors and their configuration
- Amount of memory on a node
- Type of disk storage device and RAID configuration
- Capacity of disk storage devices
- Network bandwidth and latency
- The number and size of assets stored in the Rational Asset Manager repository
- System tuning (for WebSphere® Application Server, databases, web servers, operating systems, and cache proxies)
Hardware planning
When you plan your server hardware requirements, consider the number of concurrent users to have access and the number of assets to be stored in the repository. Response time depends on the details of your specific use cases. For example, uploading a large file takes more time than displaying a web page.
Application server requirements
If you use WebSphere Application Server, you can either choose to install a new WebSphere Application Server or use your existing version of that server. You can use either server with any database or other platform software.
You can also install Rational Asset Manager on a single server that runs WebSphere Application Server and a database, and use local disks for assets and indexing; however, that configuration cannot scale well beyond 200 concurrent users. To improve performance, at a minimum, use an external database server and file server.
For the greatest flexibility in environments with many users, install Rational Asset Manager on WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment cluster environment, which allows you to distribute the load across multiple servers and across multiple disks in various ways.
Required integration: Rational Team Concert
Rational Asset Manager requires Rational Team Concert™. The Rational Team Concert application manages the lifecycle processes for assets in Rational Asset Manager. We include a limited version of Rational Team Concert that you can install and use, or you can extend an existing Rational Team Concert server application to work with Rational Asset Manager. For more information see Integrating Rational Team Concert with Rational Asset Manager.
The Rational Team Concert server application cannot be deployed as part of a WebSphere Application Server cluster. However, you can create a stand-alone application server. See Creating an application server instance for Rational Team Concert on a WebSphere Application Server distributed server cluster.
Storage requirements
Rational Asset Manager storage is composed by two components: the database and the file system. The assets are stored in the file system and the metadata are stored in the database.
The amount of storage space you need for assets depends on the types of artifacts (files) you are storing in the repository; text documents and spreadsheets are relatively small, while bootable operating system images are larger.
As one example for planning how much storage space you might need, the repository for a 3-year-old enterprise deployment with 70,000 assets requires 10 GB of space for the database, and 250 GB of space for files.
Hardware configurations to improve performance
Place the database, repository index, temporary folders, and assets directory on separate hard disk drives. Using multiple drives prevents certain operations, such as asset retrieval and indexing, from interfering with performance, such as browsing assets.
- To store more assets or to store assets with large files by using larger disks.
- To increase availability of the server applications by adding nodes.
- To increase the number of concurrent users that can use the applications by adding nodes, servers, or memory, and by using faster disks.
- To improve response, search response, and file upload and download times by adding larger, and faster disks and by improving the network.
Database requirements for metadata, metrics, and lifecycle processes storage
Rational Asset Manager requires two databases: one for asset and data storage and another for managing lifecycle processes, which is used by the included Rational Team Concert application. For best performance, place the database server application on a separate server and on a dedicated disk. To improve performance, place the database server on a separate physical computer from the application server and on a dedicated disk.
The size of the database for Rational Asset Manager depends on the size of assets and other repository activity, such as forums, tagging, and registered users. Metrics are recorded in the database for many user activities, such as searching and downloading. Even if you do not add assets to the repository, the database grows over time as user activity metrics are recorded. The size of the database increases in a linear fashion with increased repository usage.
The size of the database for Rational Team Concert depends on the amount of custom lifecycles that you add, and whether others are using Rational Team Concert as a project management and development tool.
File system requirements for asset files storage
- The Persist folder: This folder stores the asset files for your entire repository. There is one persist folder for the entire repository. On a cluster, the persist folder must be on a shared drive that all nodes and servers can access.
- The Index folders: The indexes against which
searches are performed are on each application server, not the database
server.
The size of the index depends on both the size of the assets and whether the content of the assets is mostly text, which can be indexed, or binary content, which cannot be indexed. If you use large amounts of text and large asset files, the index size is large. The amount of disk space that the index needs depends on the type of assets, number of assets, level of user activity, and length of time that the repository has existed.
On a cluster, every node must have its own index folder that must be on a local hard disk drive for the server; the index folder for each server must not be a shared drive.
- The Local folders: The local folder stores temporary data for the server applications. It must be on a local hard disk drive for the server; it must not be a shared drive. If you are installing to a cluster, each node in the cluster must have its own local storage folder that is not shared with the other nodes. If you are installing multiple servers on the same physical node, the servers must all use the same physical local storage folder.
User registries
To manage users in a large deployment, you can use an existing LDAP or other custom user registry. Both WebSphere Application Server and Tomcat application servers support using an LDAP registry to manage access to the server.
Although Rational Asset Manager supports adding users from an external registry, such as LDAP or a custom registry, you do not need to use an external registry. You can use a file-based security system, or if you are using WebSphere Application Server you can use the user accounts database for your operating system.
If you plan to manually install onto an existing WebSphere Application Server that is configured for security, for example, using LDAP, reconfigure the application server for file-based security until the installation and configuration of Rational Asset Manager is complete.
File-based security is not intended for use in production environments.
Configurations to improve user actions
When you plan for the initial platform size and for production environment upgrades, consider the relative system resources that are used by different types of operations. For example, operations through the Eclipse client consume more system operations than operations for the web client.
User actions, such as searching for, downloading, viewing, or submitting assets, require much more processing and memory resources than are needed for asset storage. As more concurrent users are added, you need more and faster servers.
- User searching for assets: For each server node, add disks or use faster disks to store search indexes for the Index storage folder.
- User creating and updating assets: Add disks and network latency for the Persist storage folder for the repository.
- Users downloading files: Add disks, processors, and memory for each server.
- Users running asset reports and audits: Use a faster disk, add memory, and improve the processor for the database server.
- Systems accessing Rational Asset Manager by using web services: On the Configuration page, view the users of your web services and configure the number of concurrent sessions that users can have.
For more specifics on tuning your system for performance, see Tuning the performance of Rational Asset Manager. To view concept diagrams of a simple and complex systems, see Deployment examples.
Large numbers of assets
If you expect the repository to contain tens or hundreds of thousands of assets, several asset management operations, such as indexing, might require several hours. You might improve performance if you use data management and hard disk management techniques, such as a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) and disk striping. Disk striping involves dividing data into blocks and storing the data blocks on multiple partitions on multiple hard disk drives. For instructions to set up disk striping for your environment, see the documentation for your operating system. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, consider placing the repository index, assets, and database each on a different hard disk.
Large file transfers
- Use a dedicated disk and a dedicated server for the persist folder.
- If you are seeing a specific performance problem, see the information in Tuning the performance of Rational Asset Manager.
- When uploading a large file, users can select the advanced upload utility in the Submit wizard on the web.
- Rational Asset Manager supports HTTP range requests, which web clients use to resume an interrupted download or to download a file in portions. When users download a large file, they can use HTTP range requests by using a web browser such as Firefox with the extension DownThemAll! (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201). Users might also consider changing large files into a set of smaller files.
Help and assistance
The Rational Asset Manager web
application accesses the help application to deliver contextual assistance
for pages, tools, and forms.
If you require users to authenticate (for example, through the application server or an external firewall) to access the Rational Asset Manager help application, you must install the Rational Asset Manager help application on the same server as the Rational Asset Manager web application.
- Deployment examples
These two figures show deployment examples. - Capacity and system planning example
In this example, Rational Asset Manager supports 200 concurrent users and 10,000 assets.
