Plan your CollabNet TeamForge 6.1.1 installation

Overview

A TeamForge site consists of a core TeamForge application and several tightly integrated services that support it.

• The core TeamForge application provides the Web interface that users see, and the API that other applications can interact with. It also includes the file system where some user content is stored, such as wiki pages.
• The site database is where most of the user-created content is stored and accessed. Documents, discussion posts, tracker artifacts, project administration settings: all that sort of thing lives in the database.
• The source control server ties any number of Subversion, CVS or Perforce repositories into the TeamForge site. These links are called "integrations" because they provide rich two-way coupling, not just a link, between the features of the source control tool and the features of the TeamForge site.
• The reporting server pulls data from the site database to populate graphs and charts about how people are using the site.
• The datamart is an abstraction of the site database, optimized to support the reporting functionality.

Install sequence

TeamForge supports multiple options for customizing and expanding your site to fit your organization's unique use patterns.

In the default setup, all services run on the same box as the main TeamForge application. But in practice, only the TeamForge application needs to run on the TeamForge application box. The other services can share that box or run on other boxes, in almost any combination. When you spread your services around to multiple boxes, you must do some configuration to handle communication among the services.

You should assess your own site's particular use patterns and resources to decide how to distribute your services, if at all. For example, if you anticipate heavy use of your site, you will want to consider running the site database, the source control service, or the reporting engine on separate hardware to help balance the load.

CollabNet has extensively tested six typical configurations:

• Out of the box: Everything runs on one machine. Perfect for sites with fewer than 100 users.
• Coder's playground: Everything runs on one box except source control, which has its own box.
• Project office: Everything runs on one box except the reporting data. Site administrators can run frequent reports without overloading the rest of the site.
• Project office, high volume: For the larger site. Source control and the reporting data get their own server.
• DBA's choice, high volume: Both databases share a box (and a single PostgreSQL instance) and source control has its own box.
• DBA's choice, with Oracle: Both databases share a box (and a single Oracle instance) and source control has its own box.

You can adopt one of these configurations, or you can make up a configuration of your own.

PostgreSQL or Oracle?

PostgreSQL 9.0 is installed automatically when you install TeamForge 6.1.1. Oracle 11 (R1 and R2) is also supported. If you intend to use Oracle, CollabNet recommends that you let the installer run its course, make sure things work normally, and then set up your Oracle database and switch over to it.

Choose your hardware

TeamForge can run on a wide range of hardware configurations.

You're on CentOS 5.6, right?

Installing TeamForge on CentOS is very similar to installing on any of the other supported environments, but there are differences that can throw you off. As you go through these steps, it's worth stopping occasionally to make sure the page you are reading corresponds to the platform you are using.