System requirements

You can deploy FootPrints on the following environments:

  • Physical servers in a private network
  • Virtual machines in a private network
  • Virtual machines in a public cloud environments (for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure).

Before you install the product, make sure that your environment meets the hardware and software requirements.

Related topics

Planning

Installing

Upgrading

Deprecated-and-discontinued-components

Product compatibility matrix

For all environments in which FootPrints is deployed, perform the following steps:

  1. Make sure that the FootPrints database is deployed in Microsoft SQL Server. 
    For example, in Microsoft Azure, the SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machine is supported and a Database-as-a-Service offering, for example, Microsoft Azure SQL Database, is not supported.
    For AWS, installing a copy of Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 virtual machines is supported and the Amazon RDS database is not supported.

  2. Make sure that there is uninterrupted network access between the FootPrints server and the complimentary services, for example, Active Directory Integration, email integration, or integration with BMC Client Management.

    Important

    We do not support configuration or maintenance of network lines between public clouds, instances of public clouds, or on-premise data centers. You must configure the network before deploying BMC products.

Key Considerations

Databases

If you are using an existing customer relational database management system (RDBMS), you can install it on any compatible hardware or operating system.

Microsoft SQL Server

  • The use of SQL Server Express versions is not supported in production environments.
  • Some SQL Server editions do not enable the TCP/IP protocol by default. Enabling the TCP/IP protocol is required for FootPrints to install and function correctly.
  • The full-text search component of SQL Server must be installed and enabled.
  • SQL Server must be configured for Mixed Mode Authentication. Mixed mode enables both Windows Authentication (integrated security) and SQL Server Authentication. If mixed mode is not selected, the FootPrints installer fails while trying to create the SQL Server login accounts required for application access. Also, the FootPrints application cannot connect to the database as the login accounts do not exist and the login method is disabled.
  • SQL Server must be installed or configured with CASE-INSENSITIVE collation.
  • In SQL Server, the default database collation is selected according to the Windows locale of the server where the SQL Server instance is installed. Ensure that the collation of the master database is set to the proper language before installing FootPrints to support the input language intended for the application correctly. For more information, see the Collation Settings in Setup and Selecting a SQL Server Collation Microsoft knowledge articles.
  • FootPrints Linux installations currently do not support the use of Microsoft SQL Server as the backend RDBMS.
  • FootPrints currently does not support Microsoft Azure as a service.

  • For FootPrints-specific SQL Server settings, see Knowledge Article no. 000251994.

 PostgreSQL

  • The PostgreSQL server installation must include the citext module to support case-insensitive functionality. The citext extension is installed as part of the PostgreSQL contrib package. The PostgreSQL contrib extensions must match in version and folder location.
  • The default max_connections property is set to 100 in postgresql.conf. Set this value to at least 450 to avoid errors.

Java

The default Java installations included in the operating system might not include all the functionality required to run FootPrints.

Web Server (Servlet Container)

  • Download and install the Tomcat version from the Apache Tomcat website. The default Tomcat installations included with the operating system might not include all the functionality required to run FootPrints.
  • Other web servers, such as Apache or IIS, can be configured to provide front-end access to the FootPrints Tomcat server instance to allow the set up of more secure deployments where Apache or IIS can run in the DMZ communicating with the FootPrints Tomcat instance running behind a firewall. The current product installation process does not support these types of custom deployments.

Security requirements

The following types of security certificates are supported:

  • DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER)
  • Base-64 encoded X.509 (.CER)

Important

Cryptographic Message Syntax - PKCS #7 Certificates (.P7B) are not currently supported.

Hardware requirements

The hardware recommendations were derived from performance tests in dedicated virtual environments. The values might be different for running FootPrints on physical servers and non-dedicated servers. The following hardware is required:

Servers

The minimum requirements for servers are as follows:

Important

  • In this table, cores refer to the actual number of physical cores on the CPU.
  • The type of CPU used determines the total number of logical processors visible in the operating system.
  • The FootPrints application server is configured by default to use up to 450 database connections. This connection pool setting is externally configurable to allow fine-tuning of the specific operational environment. You must configure the database server accordingly to support at least the same number of connections (sometimes called concurrent sessions) for each FootPrints instance running against the same database server. By increasing the number of connections on the database server, the database host experiences increased CPU, memory, and I/O activity, so make sure that the hosting hardware adequately supports the additional processing load.
  • We recommend that you configure the FootPrints instance to run against a dedicated database server instead of a shared database server, that is, a server with more than one hosted database. If you configure the FootPrints instance to run against a shared database server, it might cause performance issues.
  • When setting the Tomcat JVM maximum memory pool (-Xmx) value, make sure that there is enough physical RAM on the server to accommodate this setting, because all available memory of the server will be used for the maximum memory pool setting. Therefore, if you intend to use a maximum memory pool setting of 8192 or more, the server should have 10–12 GB of RAM if a maximum memory pool setting of 8192 or more is to be used. We recommend 80 percent.

Clients

The desktop which is used to access the FootPrints system must have a minimum screen resolution of 1280 x 720.

Language support

FootPrints officially supports the following languages:

  • English
  • German
  • French
  • Latin American Spanish
  • Brazilian Portuguese

FootPrints has five built-in language packs and the users can change their language preference at any time. Additionally, FootPrints provides a utility for customers or partners to create new language packs for other languages. The ability to create and upload these language packs is fully supported. However, the contents of these language packs have no official support. Any defects that might arise from the contents of these added language pack that don’t occur with the five official supported languages will be fixed at the discretion of BMC. 

Important

  • There is no official support for any right-to-left languages.
  • Hieroglyph-based languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, or any other language that require the use of double-byte characters are supported only in PostgreSQL installations and not in Microsoft SQL Server installations.

 

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