Test & Development Environment

[Ricci Graham]

I am trying to justify the cost of a “Test & Development” Environment and would like to know if most sites have a “T & D” environment as well as their Production environment. ANY and ALL reasons to have this would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks,

Ricci

Topic

[James Cobane]

Ricci,

In our environment, we have two separate environments; a TEST/DEVELOPMENT, and a PRODUCTION.

[David Caragay]

Ricci,

Our environment is setup in the same manner as Jim described above.  This seems to be the most common approach.

I’m wondering if anyone is utilizing a DEVELOPMENT and a TEST environment.  This would give a total of three environments (development, test, prod).   Since our development work will sometimes impact our users testing/training tasks, we occasionally think about adding a third environment just for development.  However, the management involved with supporting this type of environment seems excessive.  An additional license would not be needed if it could be “merged” into the existing environment but creative use of naming conventions and softlinks would need to be utilized.

[Gerri Jackson]

Here at Mt.Sinai, we have a separate box for our developement, and qual regions. We are in the process of upgrading our production environment to 5.3, on two new servers. The current production servers will become our test and qual regions, with HACMP running.  We have always done this here for several reasons. We use the devl region (with multiple sites) to develop and test new and upgraded interfaces. Our Qual region mimics production, and this is the region we test our code for end user sign off prior to production move.  We have several systems that also have 3 regions and the philosophy is the same for them. There are many reasons for our set up, we can test HA upgrades with out affecting production, run all testing with out taking the chance of any interferance to our production environments. I hope this helps. 🙂

[Ricci Graham]

David,

What do you mean you wouldn’t need another license for your third environment? Is this because you already have a Test and Development licence and you would just be utilizing it differently?

Ricci

[David Caragay]

Ricci,

Ideally another license and server would be used to support a third server environment.  However, you could still use you existing test license to create a psuedo development environment.  A license is assigned per server.  This would require the creation of two sites for every one production site.  

Example:

Prod server / site name:                      Radiology

test-development server / site names:  t_radiology (or radiology)

                                                               and

                                                        d_radiology

t_radiology and d_radiology would both be created and maintained under the root directory (/quovadx/qdx5.2/integrator/…..) same server.

There are some compromises to this setup.  It would not require another license but support would be more of a challenge.  Not very pretty but maybe someone has a better way of accomplishing this using one server/one license.

Gerri…  Can you tell me how you are using one server to create both devel and qual environments?  Are they running under the same root?  Using only one license?  Unless you are creating different root directories I would think that many of your cloverleaf files may be shared between devel and qual (such as /integrator/tclprocs/….)

[Ricci Graham]

David,

Thanks for the info., but you are saying you do have to have at least one Test & Development license to do this right?

Thanks,

Ricci

[David Caragay]

Yep, we currently have one prod license and one test/devl license.  With the critical nature of the interface engine, it’s pretty easy to justify a standalone server for test/devel.  Can your organization accept the risk of an extended downtime if development works crashes or corrupts the Prod environment?  Sharing the same physical box opens you up to all sorts of possibilities.  We cannot accept the risk so we implemented a standalone test/devel server and license.  The second server/license will also give you more flexibility and options when doing operating system or cloverleaf upgrades and testing.

[Bakha Nurzhanov]

We have two servers (HP9000) configured in an MCSG HA cluster. They both have appropriate licenses and both can support full set of interfaces. We have first node running our LIVE environment consisting of 3 (three) sites with over 200 threads. The second server supports TEST and TRAIN environments with total of 6 (six) sites and about 350+ threads. I fully expect each one of the servers to run all nine sites in case of fail over event. As a matter of fact I had one of them do just that when I was recently upgrading from 3.8.1P to 5.3.

[Anonymous]

We have 5 production servers and a test/development server for each one. They are all UNIX servers.

We have the test servers ready to serve as the failover server for the corresponding production server. In the near future some of our test servers will be located in a different facility to be able to recover Cloverleaf and other critical applications in case of a major disaster.

[Author]

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