Cherwell Server Farms
A Cherwell Server Farm is a configuration where a number of servers (physical or virtual) are configured to work together as a single unit, as opposed to a single-server scenario where there is only one instance of each Cherwell Server running.
- To scale the number of Users.
- To provide the ability to scale the number of Users that a Cherwell
Server Farm can serve. If there are more Users, you can add more hardware and
be able to grow horizontally to satisfy the demands of the population. In a
single-server scenario, you would have to add hardware to a single server, but
there's a limit to the amount of hardware you can implement in a single
machine. The more you grow a single server, the more expensive it gets. Using a
Cherwell Server Farm allows you to add low-cost commodity boxes to the farm
without having to exponentially pay more.
Cherwell Server Farm provides the ability to:
- Scale.
- Scale less expensively.
- Scale more without constraints of single server.
- To offer high availability.
Provide high availability (HA) so that even when one server goes down (because of a hardware failure), Users can continue using CSM. A Cherwell Server Farm eliminates a single point of failure because if one server goes down, CSM can still be used by its Users).
High availability has different levels of service. In a perfect world, when a server goes down, there is no effect to the end User. Many environments need such level of high availability, but others are prepared to sustain different levels of high availability given the cost of maintaining perfect high availability. For example, administrators trade faster performance for a level of service where some Users could be logged off if the server goes down, but they would be able to immediately log in again to continue working.