My team is planning to upgrade our entire company (20,000+ users) to BOEXI R2 SP4 (premium license) and I am trying to decide best way to go as far as using IIS or WebSphere as app server for our BO clustered environment. Also, we are trying to decide on whether to deploy our environment to Windows servers on VMWare (as we use today) or Unix servers. Of course, if we go with Unix platform, IIS is not an option. Most of our experience is on setting up and supporting BO on Windows servers using IIS, but would like to know if there are any advantages to going with Unix platform and how is customer support from BO around Unix platform. Also, how much more difficult is setting up and upgrading BO on a Unix platform than a Windows platform, if at all. My team has already setup a few standalone BOEXI R2 environments running under IIS and we have not had any problems to date. However, going with IIS limits our ability to use Voyager and Dashboard Builder products. However, Windows AD single sign-on authentication is easy to setup in IIS and not sure how difficult it is to setup in WebSphere or if it is even possible. So if anyone has experience deploying and supporting BOEXI R2 premium environment using a WebSphere app server on Windows or Unix, I would appreciate any feedback. Also, any advantages or disadvantages you have experienced between using Windows/Unix and IIS/WebSphere, would be good feedback.
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Deploying BOEXI R2 - Recommendation IIS/WebSphere and Windows/Unix
- Thread starter SomeHelp
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We currently have a clustered system on Windows 2003 servers. The report servers are on our main network and the web server is in our DMZ, between two firewalls.
Like you mention, there are some features that are not available in IIS. Also, InfoView for XI 3.0 is only available for Java, so IIS is not an option there, although a .NET version of InfoView is available for version 3.1 (I haven't had time to download or test it yet...) We're upgrading to 3.1 in early Jan 2009.
We've done a lot of testing with XI 3.0 running on the version of TomCat that comes with BO and have had very few problems. Everything deploys automatically when you use TomCat. I've heard of some configuration issues when you use WebSphere and the .war files will not automatically deploy to it when you do an install or an upgrade.
I'm not sure about the Unix side of things, though.
-Dell
A computer only does what you actually told it to do - not what you thought you told it to do.
Like you mention, there are some features that are not available in IIS. Also, InfoView for XI 3.0 is only available for Java, so IIS is not an option there, although a .NET version of InfoView is available for version 3.1 (I haven't had time to download or test it yet...) We're upgrading to 3.1 in early Jan 2009.
We've done a lot of testing with XI 3.0 running on the version of TomCat that comes with BO and have had very few problems. Everything deploys automatically when you use TomCat. I've heard of some configuration issues when you use WebSphere and the .war files will not automatically deploy to it when you do an install or an upgrade.
I'm not sure about the Unix side of things, though.
-Dell
A computer only does what you actually told it to do - not what you thought you told it to do.
Based on my experiences to date, if you can stay in the Windows OS for your BOE Servers - you will be able to obtain support and documentation from BO/SAP much more easily than if you are on the UNIX platform.
I don't know what the exact deployment numbers are, but I would think that 75%+ of BOE-XI deployments are on Windows...therefore that is where the greatest knowledge-base lies, and the first place where fixes are created/tested.
The UNIX world is supported, but the support doesn't appear to be as "deep".
I would also agree on the TomCat comments.
The closer you can keep your environment to a "vanilla" BOE-XI deployment, the easier it will be to get help if you have an issue in the future.
Senior Business Intelligence Consultant
Toronto, Canada
SeagateInfo 7 -> Crystal Enterprise -> BOE-XI (R2) / (R3.1) | Crystal ( 7 -> 2008) design | WebI design | Best practices for Java / .Net / Web Services
I don't know what the exact deployment numbers are, but I would think that 75%+ of BOE-XI deployments are on Windows...therefore that is where the greatest knowledge-base lies, and the first place where fixes are created/tested.
The UNIX world is supported, but the support doesn't appear to be as "deep".
I would also agree on the TomCat comments.
The closer you can keep your environment to a "vanilla" BOE-XI deployment, the easier it will be to get help if you have an issue in the future.
Senior Business Intelligence Consultant
Toronto, Canada
SeagateInfo 7 -> Crystal Enterprise -> BOE-XI (R2) / (R3.1) | Crystal ( 7 -> 2008) design | WebI design | Best practices for Java / .Net / Web Services
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