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Server Configuration Guidelines
In terms of initial planning, one of the most important decisions your organization must make is how many StarTeam
configurations it will use. While distributing projects across multiple StarTeam Servers will increase administrative
costs, it will also increase project independence and improve performance and availability. By estimating project
growth and considering interdependencies ahead of time, you can avoid having to split up a configuration that has
become too large. Below are some strategies to consider when developing the server deployment plan for your
organization.
Advantages of Shared Server Configurations
The advantages of having projects share the same configuration are:
♦ Transactional integrity: Because a configuration uses a single database, all data within the same
configuration is transactionally consistent. That is, a configuration represents a data consistency boundary. If
you backup and later restore a configuration, all information within the configuration will be restored to the
same point in time.
♦ Linking: Items in the same configuration can be linked, even if they are in different projects. StarTeam does
not currently support cross-configuration linking.
♦ Sharing and moving: An item can be shared or moved to any folder, view, or project within the same
configuration. Moving or sharing items across configuration boundaries is not supported.
♦ Administrative simplicity: Administrative tasks such as adding users and groups, applying security,
performing backups, and so forth are done at the configuration level.
♦ Shared customizations: Many StarTeam resources such as filters, queries, custom forms, and workflows
can be defined at the configuration level and shared by all projects. (However, custom forms and workflow can
also be customized per project or per view.)
♦ Shared server components: All data in the same configuration utilize a single server process, database,
vault, and root Cache Agent. New projects can be added dynamically without adding any new server-side
components.
Advantages of Separate Server Configurations
The advantages of having projects in separate configurations are:
♦ Performance: Larger configurations take longer to start, use more resources, and tend to return larger
command responses. Conversely, smaller configurations have less data and fewer concurrent users, so they
tend to perform better in these regards.
♦ Managing growth: Even if you initially place multiple configurations on a single machine, you can easily move
a configuration to its own machine if you need to.
♦ Maintenance schedules: Separate configurations can be independently started and stopped for installing
patches, upgrading hardware, etc. When a configuration is offline, all projects it contains are unavailable.
♦ Custom fields: Custom fields are added at the “type” level, which has configuration-level scope. This means
that if you add a custom field to a CR, all CRs in that configuration will have a value for that field. Hence, if
different teams or business units have competing interests in custom fields, this argues for placing their projects
in separate configurations.
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