Deploying CloudReady

We’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to
We here at Exoprise make CloudReady easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to setup and understand. Even though it is easy, we still get questions from customers when they begin to scale their deployment: How many sites do I need, how many sensors can I run on a site, where should my sites be located? This is the first in a series of articles that will provide guidance on how to best deploy CloudReady throughout your environment.

Hold on while I requisition a rack of servers

Often as customers move from trial to paid subscription they ask us about how many servers or racks of servers they will need to requisition. We smile at the notion. CloudReady is designed to be run in lean environments without allocation of dedicated servers. In fact, we always recommend that CloudReady Private Sites (i.e. monitoring points deployed within the customer’s network) be installed near to where users are operating – on the users’ networks, not the datacenter networks.

Lean, mean, and self-healing

We designed our software to be run in the most challenging operational environments. The services are insulated from and resilient to harsh networks, OS changes/updates, varied OS platforms and low CPU & memory constraints. Exoprise CloudReady runs on any version of Windows as a service that can be installed and run as LocalSystem, a local machine account, or a domain account. No need to download and manage dedicated VMs or deploy hardware appliances. CloudReady is lean, mean and easy to setup. Once installed, CloudReady is completely self-healing and self-updating – set it and forget it.

Low CPU, Memory and Disk Requirements

Yes, we often get speeds and feeds questions…”What are the requirements, how much memory, how much CPU,” etc.. No need to worry. You can easily run 10 sensors (i.e. test 10 apps) on a private site in a small VM with 2GB of memory (we use even higher densities in our automated test/dev/staging). This means you can co-locate a private site on anybody’s desktop. In many cases our customers have deployed in branch office scenarios and have set-up a CloudReady site on an administrators or assistant’s workstation with no noticeable effect on system performance.

Private v. Public Sites

Another question we often hear is whether to deploy sensors in Public Sites (one of the cloud-based monitoring points managed by us) or their own Private Sites? With Public Sites, Exoprise has added the ability to get “outside-in” or “cloud-to-cloud” performance data, in addition to the “inside-out” view you get from Private Sites. This can be helpful when you have remote or telecommuting employees and want to understand their end-user experience outside of your firewall, or if you want an outside-in view of the network and internet services (like ADFS) that you provide from your datacenters or HQ.

Public Site sensors can also provide a great baseline for comparing against your own Private Site sensors. Exoprise Public Sites are hosted in datacenters with very stable and fast networks, enabling you to determine when performance issues are specific to local network/infrastructure issues v. problems with your application provider’s environment.

Bulk deployment for packaging

Finally, when you ready to go big Exoprise has the tools you need to integrate with your software deployment systems like System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Altiris, LANDesk and others. Bulk deployment is a simple three step process:

1. Create and allocate public/private key pairs used by the sites to authenticate with the service. Key pairs can be used by multiple sites but creating unique key pairs for each site authenticity.
    
2. Download the Private Site installation executable
    
3. Package the installation, supplying the specific command-line arguments, and distribute with whatever software distribution tools you use in your environment.
    

More information about our bulk deployment and security mechanisms can be found at help.exoprise.com.

More to come. Stay tuned!