The key to a successful Lab Management installation and deployment depends on the
intelligent planning and design of the Lab Management network components.
The best design
reflects your company’s requirements, and its current and future development and
testing goals. Based on these criteria, you can then determine how best to build
your
Lab Management environment to support those goals. Once the
Lab Management environment
configuration is finalized, the
Lab Management Installer is run to perform the automated
installation of all
Lab Management components.
Note: Adding Lab Management components after the installation is a more difficult and time-consuming
procedure because each one must be entered manually into the system. Therefore, it
pays to plan carefully!
Before you can install Lab Management, you must know the following information about your
network:
- What kind of network deployment will you use (a Direct-Access
Deployment, an Isolated-Access Deployment, or a Mixed-Access
Deployment)?
- This decision affects the kind of network topology that you will adopt — a
direct-access or an isolated-access configuration.
Important: You are strongly advised to use direct-access deployment for all guest node networks.
- How many subnets are you allocating to Lab Management and what size and type are
they?
- For example, if you have only one subnet and you are using a Direct-Access
Deployment, you can make the Lab Management Manager single-homed.
Also, it is better to have few subnets with as much space as possible. You can have upto 999 guests in the largest single subnet that Lab Management can support.
- How many network interfaces will your Lab Management Manager need?
The formula is this:
Number of network interfaces required on the Lab Management Manager = Number of
subnets under management (+1 if you are using an Isolated-Access
Deployment) (+1 if the LOM network is non-routable).
For example, if you are using an Isolated Access Deployment with 20 Client
nodes in one subnet and a non-routable LOM network, you need 3 network
interfaces.
- How many Infrastructure nodes do you need?
-
The absolute minimum Infrastructure nodes that you can have are the Lab Management
Manager and the Primary Active Directory Server (which would be adequate
for a small test domain). If you have a large deployment such as 100 Client
nodes in a Lab Management Domain, one Primary Active Directory Server might not be
sufficient. In this case, you would add a Secondary Active Directory Server.
Because both the Primary and Secondary Active Directory Servers are VMware
virtual images, you would deploy them on separate physical nodes. A second
Active Directory Server is a useful backup for higher availability in case of a
problem with one of the physical machines.
If you need to support SPARC-based Solaris machines, you need a Solaris
SPARC Bootserver. A single Solaris SPARC Bootserver is sufficient for even a
large Lab Management installation.
- What is the Lab Management subdomain name?
- What is the corresponding CollabNet TeamForge or CollabNet Enterprise Edition (CEE) site?
- Obtain the necessary access information (usernames and passwords) for all of
the Lab Management components.
- Will your setup include an ESXi server?
- If yes:
- Will it be an unmanaged node?
- Will it be hosting the Lab Management manager itself?