Sites and Site Structure

Site: Basic Unit of the Site Structure

You use sites to represent the individual locations of your enterprise. Every site contains at least one depot as the source for installation on the clients.

 

All the depots in a site provide identical resources. This is guaranteed by DSM's distribution mechanism.
The first depot in a site is the master depot of the site, the others are local depots.

Site Structure

The division of a network into a number of sites can, for example, reflect the different locations of an enterprise that are linked by a WAN or various departments within a building.
The site structure combines the sites into a logical and hierarchical arrangement. Two container objects help in this arrangement:

  • Organization (ORG)
  • Region

 

The complete site structure contains more types of objects:

  • Management Point
    A Management Point (MP) is a computer that provides the services of different management applications such as Business Logic Server or OSD Proxy. Every MP provides an infrastructure based on the Management Services allowing a remote installation and configuration of Management applications.
  • Depot
    A depot provides the storage for the repositories, the Infrastructure Configuration Database (ICDB) and the DSM program files. Every depot is assigned to a specific site within the site structure.
  • Repository
    Logical storage for packages within the site structure. The physical location is on the depot to which the repository is assigned to in the site structure.
    The context (“location”) of a repository in the site structure determines the sites from which this repository can be accessed.

The site structure makes it possible to define and modify settings for a number of sites simultaneously:

  • You can set many settings at a central location and inherit them through the site structure.
  • You can also specify the repository to be used separately for each site by defining repositories on the site level. By using appropriate administration permissions you can then ensure, for example, that site administrators are only able to edit "site repositories".