High availability deployment for production

Consider these best practices when planning for high availability (HA) in your deployment.

High availability overview

The application employs a standard three-tier architecture: client, application server, and database. Clients include smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.

To achieve HA, you can use multiple servers for each server and database component, and employ load balancers where needed. For the BMC Digital Workplace server, the server grouping is a cluster. For Remedy Action Request System (AR System) server with Remedy IT Service Management (Remedy ITSM), the server grouping is a server group. 

The following diagram illustrates the communication between components in a typical production deployment for BMC Digital Workplace Basic. This diagram does not include BMC Virtual Chat, BMC Live Chat or BMC Digital Workplace Catalog because these products are included with BMC Digital Workplace Advanced. To simplify the diagram, Remedy Single Sign-On (Remedy SSO) is not included. 

Deployment architecture diagram

BMC Digital Workplace integrates with other systems by using a variety of providers. The application can expose aspects of other IT applications through the UI, or it can use other applications to aid or enhance core BMC Digital Workplace functionality. For example, BMC Digital Workplace integrates with modules in Remedy ITSM to submit service requests and to search for knowledge articles. Providers handle integrations with BMC Digital Workplace.

The following diagram includes all components for BMC Digital Workplace Advanced. To simplify the diagram, Remedy SSO is not included. 

Deployment architecture diagram

Clusters and server groups

For HA and performance, each server type should be set up as a cluster behind a load balancer. For Remedy servers, these clusters are called server groups.

Remedy Single Sign-On

The following diagram provides an overview of the Remedy SSO architecture. 

In this diagram, BMC Digital Workplace refers to both BMC Digital Workplace and BMC Digital Workplace Catalog servers.

Remedy SSO overview

Communication to external networks

Communication to an external network is required for the following capabilities:

• Notification to mobile clients—Google cloud messaging provides notifications to Google Android devices. Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) provides notifications to Apple iOS devices.
• Location awareness—Google Maps APIs provide the geographic maps displayed on all clients.

If you do not use these capabilities, your deployment can remain fully within your internal network. For details about ports used for communication, see Required ports. 

BMC Digital Workplace mobile applications

BMC Digital Workplace uses a responsive UI based on the Progressive Web App that supports all clients—from desktop to mobile devices. The Progressive Web App replaces the native apps to simplify the mobile apps distribution. All features and customization are available on compatible desktop and mobile devices. 

If required, for Apple iOS devices, you can use the standard app that BMC provides, or you can distribute the mobile client. For more information on the deployment options, see Deploying clients.