Hi Emily,

I am not an expert on this matter, but I will try to explain what I know. If there is anyone who has more experience on this matter, please feel free to correct me or add on to what i have below.

The purpose of DNS is to resolve hostnames to a ip address. How many entries you need will depend on your setup and requirements. Let's say I have 3 servers in my environment:

Server/Computer Name               Purpose

web                                                   Web server (for hosting smartforms)

app                                                    K2 server (app)

db                                                      Database server

* Server/Computer name here refers to the name assigned to the server on the server itself. You can view this opening command prompt, and enter "hostname" (without quotes).

When these servers are first joined to the domain, 3 DNS entries should automatically be created to map the server names to their respective ip addresses. If these entries are not created, you have to check with your infra admin.

In such a non load-balanced environment, just having these 3 DNS entries is sufficient. Your app server will have K2 setup to connect to the database server via the server name (db). Your web server will have smartforms setup to connect to your app server via the server name as well.

Now the web server is a little tricky. If you want to allow users to access smartforms by using your server name (eg. https://web/Runtime or https://web.domain.com/Runtime), then you should not need additional DNS entries. So total DNS entries required is 3 here. 

If you want users to access smartforms using another name, let's say k2forms.domain.com, then you will need 1 more DNS entries to map k2forms.domain.com to the web server's ip address. So in total you will have 4 DNS entries.

For a load-balanced or farm setup, things get a little more complicated. A K2 server farm consists of at least 2 K2 servers. You will have a farm address in this scenario, such that when you try to perform any K2 operations from the farm address, it will route your request to one of the two servers.

So aside for the default 2 DNS entries created for the 2 servers, you will need 1 more DNS entry for the farm address. So at this point, if you have 1 K2 farm with 2 servers, 1 web server, and 1 database server, the total DNS entries you should have become 5.

Assuming you want to add another web server into the mix to distribute the load. So 1 more web server means 1 more DNS entries, so 5+1=6 DNS entries. In order for load-balancing to work, you need another address which users used to send request to. Once the request is sent to the address, your load balancer will route the request to one of the web server. The total DNS entry count is 6+1=7.

I may have missed some things out, but the general idea is:

• Each server should have 1 DNS entry to map its server name to its ip address


• Each additional name or alias you want to add require 1 additional DNS entry


• For load-balanced or farm setup, you will need at least 1 additional DNS entry for the farm name or load-balancer

My recommendation is to list out all your server and their names, then list out any additional hostnames you require, and add them up. That should give you a general idea how many DNS entries you need. If you are still unsure, you can contact K2 Services to aid you in setting up your environment.