Server farm installation question

Hi Nicolas, the server farm FQDN is the domain name which is mapped to the
VIP of your server farm in DNS.

 To clarify;

 

You have 2 nodes in your server farm hosted behind a hardware balancing
solution "bp1.nlb.com 192.168.1.1" and "bp2.nlb.com 192.168.1.2"
you would also have a IP which is used for requests to the cluster to be
balanced "bpcluster.nlb.com 192.168.1.10" this is the address which
is used for the server farm FQDN. On the DNS servers the address
"bpcluster.nlb.com" must be mapped to the IP "192.168.1.10".

In regards to Kerberos a set of SPNs need to be set for each node in the
cluster and the cluster address. Kerberos is reliant upon DNS so if the servers
or cluster do not have entries in DNS Kerberos will fail.

Also note that all the BP servers in the farm must run under the same account as this would be the account to which the SPNs are mapped, and you can not have multiple accounts with the same SPNs as again Kerberos will fail.  

Regards,

Hi Nicolas, the server farm FQDN is the domain name which is mapped to the VIP of your server farm in DNS.

My organisation is carrying out a new K2 install. We're putting this on a high-availability virtualized platform, so we are not interested in any NLB and will not use NLB, but we do want a distributed architecture, something like this:

Back-end tier -

Single SQL Server database - SQL.whatever.com

Middle-tier

K2 App Server - k2s.whatever.com

Front end tier (IIS requests and components) K2 workspace

K2 Workspace Server - k2w.whatever.com

--  So it's essentially a three-tier solution but using just a single server at each tier as the Fault tolerance will be handled elsewhere, and because we don't really need to scale up with NLB as we're a pretty small shop. We just want a distributed arrangement, that's all

1) Is this possible?

2) What do I specify for the FQDN for the Farm when carrying out my initial installation? Do I just use a 'virtual' A record, and if so, should that be pointing to the Web server at the front-end, or to that app server in the middle-tier?

thanks

1. 
   
2. Yes. From K2's perspective it will be a single K2 Server installation, a common occurrence. I know of a number of clients using platforms like VMWare and Hyper-V.
   
3. This will not be a Farm installation. You will only need a Farm when you have 2 or more K2 Servers (or plan to).
   

OK... So from what you are saying, I would carry out my K2 installation as if were a single server install (no farm)

I understand that K2 will accept "any" SQL Server connection, so that gives me two tiers.

But for the front-end, is there a guide anywhere that will explain how I need to "manually" move the IIS components, to bring the 3rd, front-end server into the equation? The documentation I am looking at mentions the possibility of doing this (moving the IIS components to another server) but does not elaborate or offer any links.

thanks for any advice or a steer

You don't need to move anything manually. You simply run the installer on your web/front end server and only select Workspace. You will need to have K2 Server installed prior to this (and similarly, only install your K2 Host Server on the application server, no web components).