Adams Server Virtual Machine

Adams fully supports running in a virtual environment.  In fact we use virtual machines internally at Foray.  This document serves as a general guideline for running Adams in a virtual environment.  However, Foray does not specialize in virtual machines and we therefore direct you to your virtual server vendor for advice on how to setup and manage your virtual environment.

Adams has three separate server components.  These can be run on separate servers or all on the same server.

• Web applications
• Database
• File Share

For more information about each of these see the Foray Adams Installation Guide.

The resources required by these components can vary greatly from one agency to another.  With physical hardware we recommend overbuying since procuring new hardware can be so difficult.  With a virtual environment there is more flexibility to add additional resources as required.  The recommendations for a virtual environment will be broken down into the three primary resources: CPU, RAM, and Storage.

CPU

The web application has the largest potential to use CPU resources and the File Share has the smallest.  We generally recommend starting with allocating four cores.  If resources are constrained and your agency believes the system will have fairly light use you could try two cores, but a single core is never recommended.

RAM

Here both the database and the web applications have the potential to use a lot of RAM.  With the database you have the ability to constrain its RAM utilization.  1 GB for the database should be sufficient and 2 GB ample.  We recommend starting with at least 4 GB of RAM for the virtual server and preferably 8 GB, particularly if all three components are running on the same server.

Storage

The database is unlikely to use more than a couple of gigabytes of disk space.  The web application uses space for caching and downloads but 10 or 20 GB should be more than enough.  The Repository File Share could potentially, depending on your agency, use terabytes of storage.  It should be isolated from the other partitions for maximum flexibility and ideally will be on a SAN.  Using virtual server storage incurs a performance penalty due to the virtualization layer.

No matter what resources you start with initially we strongly recommend you monitor utilization and adjust as necessary.  The Foray Adams system handles uncommonly large files when compared to Word and Excel documents and the resources required can be significantly greater than Agencys are used to.