What is a Base Deployment?
The base deployment is ideal for medium-size businesses, or as a testing and staging environment for large enterprises. After developing the solution on a single server deployment, you should stage the solution to a base deployment for testing. You will resolve many authentication and connection issues in a base deployment that were not discovered in a single server deployment because in the base deployment, the SQL Server databases run on separate computers from the Web servers. In a single server deployment, the databases reside on the same computer as the Web server, so there is no need to connect and authenticate with separate database servers to read data.
The base deployment uses a computer that is running ISA Server as a firewall to separate and help protect the Web servers from the Internet.
The base deployment separates the presentation services from the database services into a Web tier and data tier, respectively. Customers have direct access to the Web tier only, where the files and presentation services provide read-only access. The database servers allow for read and write operations.
The Web tier provides site presentation functionality that formats the data provided by the various data sources and services.
The data tier provides data storage for all the production site data and resources, and provides user account and domain services for the whole deployment.
In a sample base deployment, you can deploy two Web servers in the Web tier, and two servers in the data tier. You can distribute incoming client requests between the Web servers by using a hardware load balancer or Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB). In the data tier and Web tier, you deploy an Active Directory directory service domain controller. You cluster the database servers for failover by using Microsoft Windows Clustering.
Note
This topic does not address or show servers that were used for staging. The base deployment addresses medium-size businesses that would deploy Commerce Server 2009 Standard edition. The Standard edition does not include Commerce Server Staging (CSS). To deploy CSS, you must install Commerce Server 2009 Enterprise Edition.
To configure a base deployment to support CSS, you can use one of two options:
Configure the business management server to support staging, and either add a staging SQL Server database or point to another database instance on the production SQL Server database servers for staging business data.
Add a staging server and a staging SQL Server database to support CSS. For an illustration of this configuration, see Commerce Server Staging.
See Also
Other Resources
What is an Enterprise Deployment?