Geographically-distributed installations

The largest customer environments usually cannot be entirely contained within a single data center. In these cases, it is necessary to consider not just the scale of the BMC Server Automation installation but also its geographic distribution. This topic describes additional infrastructure recommended for managing servers in remote data centers.

The following diagram summarizes the recommendations for geographically-distributed deployments.

Note

BMC Server Automation does not support running the Application Server across a Wide Area Network (WAN) or otherwise slow or latent connection from the BMC Server Automation database.

SOCKS proxies

For a remote data center that is accessible only through a firewall, BMC recommends the use of a SOCKet Secure (SOCKS) proxy in the remote data center. You can configure the firewall to route connections on port 1080 (the SOCKS proxy port) to the SOCKS proxy server, which then brokers a connection to the actual target server agent (on port 4750, the RSCD agent port).

Repeaters

You can configure repeaters as staging areas for deployment files. Effective use of repeaters in remote data centers can significantly reduce the amount of network traffic that must be carried over long (slow and/or expensive) data lines.

Provisioning servers

As a rule, support for provisioning targets in remote data centers must be provided from provisioning servers that are located in the remote data center. Depending on the provisioning technology used, each remote data center must provide support for one or more provisioning-related services, (for example, DHCP, PXE and TFTP servers)

Patch repositories

Because of the potentially large payloads involved, patching in a geographically-distributed environment is best supported by implementing a copy of the patch repository in each data center.

Citrix Presentation Server

If, in addition to remote managed servers, the installation also requires access to BMC Server Automation for remote users, BMC recommends the use of a Citrix Presentation Server. For performance reasons, it is usually not practical to deploy a management console (BMC Server Automation Console) at a remote site, due to the bandwidth and latency requirements for the console-to-configuration server link.