Any Installation Guide for On-Premise?

[yetanother_andrey]

Hi,

I'm now reading thru AC 6.1 docs to understand how to proceed with on-premise installation as we may need this in future.

What I see so far is that 1 server is required for AC itself (neolane web, etc) + 1 for DB engine + 1 for incoming mails (bounces).

What is still unclear:

1. Servers for web tracking for Email channel: what are configuration steps on them, network/hardware requirements?

2. Hardware requirements for AC and DB servers and what are they depends on (number of Recipients/Deliveries/etc?)?

Is there any comprehensive Installation Guide for the entire Solution similar to as many other vendors (Symantec, Microsoft) provide for their systems?

Thanks

[florentlb]

Hi,

Most available documentation is available through the guide you have linked. You can also have a look at the Adobe Campaign Implementation Guide​. But to go further and understand what to do specifically with your installation, you would need to get in touch with your sales rep or consulting team to adapt your infrastructure to your needs.

The reason why all is not publicly available through the official documentation portal is that every on-premise installation is different depending on the need and surrounding infrastructure, and thus requires expertise to assess the possibilities. Having those in the docs would probably lead to misconfigurations and wrong infrastructures.

Still, here is a list of what's available for the topics you listed:

• Hardware Sizing Guide for Campaign 6.1 (PDF document)
• Different types of deployments
• Setting up Web server (for Windows - you can find other pages in this guide explaining the steps for Linux as well)

Hope this helps,

Florent. 

[david--garcia]

Deploying AC varies depending on the requirements and infrastructure for each individual client, you can successfully deploy AC running all services under a single server, or spread the services among multiple servers- i.e.

a) Marketing server

b) Message Centre

c) Frontal Server 1

d) Frontal Server 2

1. Where frontal servers do the tracking/redirection for Marketing and Message Centre
2. MTAs for a-b run on c&d servers (email delivery)
3. SMS services run on a&b

and so on...

Like florent said, you can follow the documentation (which is not straight forward btw) and with trial an error on a sandbox environment you can try out loads of things, I personally suggest running a few VMs under the same network and try it out, but  start with a single box installation test to get the idea.

[yetanother_andrey]

Hi,

We're currently using AC hosted by Adobe for almost 2 years and have already done some customizations ourselves. So yes, I can say we've got an idea of how AC works.

But now we probably have a reason to build on-premise environment in addition to hosted ones. And what I'm trying to do now is understand technical steps of implementing AC.

Today we're using Message Centre and email tracking, so for sure we would need Message Centre and Frontal Servers. What is still unclear for me from public docs is how to install these components on separate servers (run installation, configure, connect to AC srv).

Right now I'm thinking about such infrastructure we might have:

1. 1 VM for AC itself

2. 1/2 VMs for Postgres

3. 1 VM for Message Centre

4. 2 VMs for Frontal Servers

[david--garcia · Accepted solution]

On premise deployment is something that Adobe would charge up to $200k. if you learn how to do it your self that would be such a big saving.

By default, all services are installed on all servers, it is disabling/enabling those services that makes the distributed architecture, this is done through the config-yourinstance.xml files- i.e.

For the following example you can have the marketing server forward email to be processed by the MTAs in the frontal servers.

markerting / config-marketing1.xml

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<serverconf>
    <shared>
        <dataStore hosts="*" lang="en_GB">
            <dataSource name="default">
                <dbcnx encrypted="1" login="xxx:xxx" password="xxx" provider="mssql" server="xxx,1434" />
            </dataSource>
        </dataStore>
        <module defaultNameSpace="xxx" />
    </shared>
    <mta autoStart="false">
        <child>
            <smtp />
        </child>
    </mta>
    <stat autoStart="true" />
    <wfserver autoStart="true" />
    <inMail autoStart="true" />
    <sms autoStart="true" />
    <web>
        <relay />
    </web>
</serverconf>

frontal1 / config-marketing1.xml

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<serverconf>
    <shared>
        <dataStore hosts=localhost" lang="en-GB">
            <dataSource name="default">
                <dbcnx encrypted="1" login="xx:xx" password="xx" provider="mssql" server="xxx,1434" />
            </dataSource>
        </dataStore>
        <module defaultNameSpace="xxx" />
    </shared>
    <mta autoStart="true" statServerAddress="marketing (IP or DNS here)">
        <child>
            <smtp>
                <IPAffinity localDomain="xxx" name="newsandbatch">
                    <IP address="xxx" heloHost="xxx" publicId="8" weight="5" />
                    <IP address="xxx" heloHost="xxx" publicId="9" weight="3" />
                </IPAffinity>
                <IPAffinity localDomain="xxx" name="newsandbatch_sms">
                    <IP address="xxx" heloHost="xxx" publicId="164" weight="1" />
                </IPAffinity>
            </smtp>
        </child>
    </mta>
    <stat autoStart="false" />
    <wfserver autoStart="false" />
    <inMail autoStart="false" />
    <sms autoStart="false" />
    <web>
        <redirection databaseId="xxx" trackingPassword="xxx" />
    </web>
</serverconf>

The config-xxx.xml files are generated automatically when you setup tracking/redirection on the control instances.

[yetanother_andrey]

Wow, thanks!

So, on all servers I should run thru standard installation process and then switch off modules that I don't need on each particular servers and manually configure access parameters to/from control instance?

[david--garcia]

Yeah thats right, this id done by setting the autostart param to false in the config files <stat autoStart="false" />