5.2 Creating a Deployment

Create a New Deployment

Click the Deployments tab to access the Deployment Editor. The tree view on the left-hand side shows each Deployment. If you expand a Deployment, you can see the Inside and Outside nodes in the deployment. Each node in the tree view has a right-click command menu. When you left-click the Deployments node in the left-hand pane, you see the top-level Deployment Editor screen. To create a new Deployment, you can either click the Create Deployment button in this screen, or right-click the Deployments node in the left-hand pane and select the Create Deployment command in the right-click menu.

Define the New Deployment

When you click the Create a New Deployment button in the initial Deployment Editor page, this page appears. Here you can name your new deployment and begin entering its defining elements.

You can set these options for an entire deployment, and they will apply to all machines defined for that deployment. You can then edit at the individual machine level as needed.

Connect System User Name - The login user name for Connect
FTP Name - Your FTP account user name
Connect Home Directory - The deployment directory for Connect on all machines

Note: These settings may be overridden for individual nodes in the Deployment.

Once you save the new Deployment record, you will see the tabbed Deployment Editor. Since the new Deployment is new and has not yet been installed and ctivated, you will only see four tabs: Edit, Machines, Services, and Port.

Adding Machines to the Deployment

Note: In the Deployment Editor, we refer to machines and nodes interchangeably.

You can see the nodes in the current Deployment by clicking the Machines tab. To add a node, you many use the menu commands to the right of the page title, or the right-click menus in the left-hand pane. Each Deployment must have at least one inside node and one outside node.

When creating a new node, specify the following values for the machine you’re adding to the deployment:

Host Name - Enter the DNS name of the node.
OS - Select your computer’s operating system from the drop down.
Number of Processors - Enter the number of processor cores for this node. Certain modules will limit their concurrency based on this setting.
CPU Speed - This is a relative metric of machine capacity. Connect assumes that a node with CPU Speed of 1000 will have twice the capacity of a node with CPU Speed of 500. This metric is used when automatically deploying inside-node services. Connect assigns larger service components to the machines with the greatest capacity.

You may either use Automatic Component Selection or manually determine which services run on this node. When you use Automatic Component Selection, Connect will deploy inside-node services based on the CPU Speed of each node.

You may use the default deployment settings or you may override the default settings for each node.

By default, outside nodes have a Mail Sender, Mail Receiver, and Tracker. Outside nodes may optionally have an SMPP Sender and an SMPP Receiver. You may decide to deploy or not deploy these services on each outside nodes.

Use Default Deployment Settings - This option is selected by default. If you leave this box checked, the machine you’re defining will be given the FTP and directory settings you define at the deployment level. If you want to define unique settings for this machine, uncheck this box and make your machine-specific changes.
FTP User - User name for your FTP account.
FTP Password - Password for your FTP account.
Connect Home Directory - If you leave Use Deployment settings checked, this is the home directory path for this entire deployment of Connect. If you uncheck Use Deployment settings, this is the home directory path for Connect on this machine.
Note: Be sure to specify a home directory that is different from your install directory.

Click Save to save the node. Connect will return you to the Machines tab. Here you can add another machine to the deployment, edit machine data, delete a machine, or proceed to install the deployment.

Install Software on Deployment Machines

In the Machines tab, there is an Actions menu to the right of each node. You should perform two actions for each node:

Update Host Key to fetch and save the ssh host key of the node (if you are using SFTP)
Install to copy the Connect software to the node

Connect will check the CPU speed you defined for each machine and decide which components to deploy, omitting those you elected to disable for each machine. Connect will deploy each service on at least one machine.

Click Refresh to see the new Install Status. The status of each selected machine will progress from "Not Installed" to "Installing" and eventually to "Installed". Clicking Refresh will show you the current state of service installation for all selected machines.

When the Install Status of all machines selected changes to Installed, click Activate Deployment.

Note: If Connect detects errors while installing to the machines, it will display messages beside the affected machines. FTP connectivity issues are the most common source of errors at this stage and can be diagnosed by setting the FTP Diagnostic Setting to Very Verbose and then looking in the application server log. (The Connect UI will log to the application server log.)