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 AR System server with 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 BMC Remedy IT Service Management (Remedy ITSM) to submit service requests and to search for knowledge articles. Providers handle integrations with BMC Digital Workplace.

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 Single Sign-On architecture. 

For more information about Remedy Single Sign-On, see the following topics in the Remedy Single Sign-On documentation:

• Remedy SSO overview

• Remedy SSO architecture

• Integrating Remedy SSO with BMC Digital Workplace

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 introduced a new responsive UI in the 19.02 release. The new UI is designed based on the Progressive Web App that supports all clients—from desktop to mobile devices. The new Progressive Web App replaces the native apps to simplify the mobile apps distribution. All features and customization are seamlessly made 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.