What is the Physical Design of a Deployment?
This section provides information about the physical design of the prescribed deployment scenario. It presents the network topology of the deployment and describes the servers in the base, enterprise, staging, and internal development/test/business management tiers.
In the prescribed deployment scenario, the production environment consists of three tiers. Internal business users belong to a separate domain—that of the corporate network. External site visitors access the deployment over the Internet.
Physically, you create four separate network segments for the following tiers:
Data tier in the run-time environment.
Web tier in the run-time environment.
Staging tier in the design-time environment.
Internal development/test/business management tier in the design-time environment.
The internal development/test/business management tier is in its own domain. You should set up a domain trust with the staging tier so that you can stage from the test tier to the staging tier.
The data tier consists of clustered computers that are running SQL Server, a Data Warehouse and analysis server, a business management server, and an Active Directory directory service domain controller. A firewall helps protect these servers from Web tier access in case a malicious user manages to compromise the Web tier. Another firewall protects the database servers against access from the internal development/test/business management tier to prevent internal users from accidentally overwriting run-time data and disrupting run-time operations.
The Web tier consists of two Web servers and an Active Directory domain controller. A firewall/load balancer helps protect the deployment from malicious users on the Internet, and a firewall protects the Active Directory domain controller and the data tier from malicious users who manage to compromise the Web tier. The Web tier domain trusts the data tier domain.
The staging tier consists of a computer that is running SQL Server and a business management server. This tier belongs to the same domain as the database servers. This tier stages data from the internal development/test/business management tier to the run-time environment. The business management server in this tier runs the Catalog and Inventory Web service, the Marketing Web service, and the Orders Web service.
The internal development/test/business management tier consists of a computer that is running SQL Server, a business management server, and an Active Directory domain controller. You can conduct pre-production development and testing, and stage the data to the staging tier for pre-production testing in this tier. Business users can connect to the data-tier business management server, and to the Web services that are running on the staging server from this tier.