Hi,
On 5/4/2012 11:57 AM, Jill Minor wrote:
We are a mixed consortium straddling the Virginia/Tennessee border. We
need to know how to set up an Evergreen demo and so far, we have not
been able to make head or tail of anyone’s advice. There are two public
library systems and two small college libraries involved. We have given
up on the idea of cloud hosting because we hear it is very slow, and we
don’t want to spook our staffs any more than necessary. We would like to
host our own demo. It must be accessible to every consortium location
and handle a sample of 500 records. Please, in plain English, what
equipment do we require for our demo? Would it be advisable to just go
ahead and purchase a server that will eventually contain the entire
Evergreen installation and put our demo on it? How large a server would
we need to buy?
One of the many nice things about Evergreen is that it can make use good
use of multiple servers. As a result, since your starting point is
setting up a small demo system, a server you get for the demo can later
be repurposed to become part (say an application server or load
balancer) of your production Evergreen setup. Alternatively, it could
become a development or possibly a test system.
One advantage of this approach is that you can defer the capital expense
of getting all of the servers (or a big-enough server) for your
production system until you need it.
Since you want 500 or so records in your demo system, and making the
assumption that at most only a few tens of library staff would be
accessing the demo simultaneously, I agree with Justin that a server
with 4 CPU cores and 4 G of RAM would be plenty to run a demo system on.
100G of disk space would be plenty, and 50G would be adequate.
The number of CPU cores is just a suggestion; if you buy a new server
rather than use an existing one, there are plenty of entry-level server
models that *start* at 6 or 8 cores.
That leaves the operating system -- I recommend running Evergreen on
either Debian or Ubuntu Server, so if you go with one of those, I would
also recommend getting an assurance from the server manufacturer that
their product is compatible with one of those OSs. You can also check
Debian's [1] and Ubuntu's [2] server compatibility lists.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn
[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/server/
Regards,
Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Director of Support and Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email: [email protected]
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell: +1 404-984-4366
skype: gmcharlt
web: http://www.esilibrary.com
Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
http://evergreen-ils.org
