modeling network aspects of deployment?

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kgeis
Posts: 5
Joined: 10 Jul 2012, 00:37

I would like to be able to generate a diagram that shows certain physical aspects of a deployment of a server and the applications running on it. The diagram would show a hierarchy with different kinds of containers (building > server farm > VM > application server) and the application at the lowest level. I also would like to be able to document ports and URL paths that different services run on. For instance, on VM 1 has a firewall on it that allows traffic from certain hosts on certain ports; Apache runs on port 80, and the path /app1 is proxied to Tomcat AJP running on port 8011.

Is this too low level to be appropriate for this kind of tool?
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

This is certainly low level but we designed the Physical Technology layer to manage scenarios like this.

The key concepts in Technology Physical are quite simple but powerful.

We can use Technology Node to capture any locate-able element in the architecture. This could be a network, a domain, a server, a virtual server, a virtual server host etc. - as long as we can locate it, using the Site instances.

We use Sites to capture physical places such as buildings, rooms, racks and the like. You'll find Site under Business Physical and if we want we can associate Geographical data with them. Sites can contain other sites, so we can map Technology Nodes to any level of granularity in terms of Sites. I've done this at the building level and also at the rack level for servers, for example.

On each Technology Node, we can 'deploy' Technology Instances, which are used to capture the instances of application technology, infrastructure technology (e.g. Apache, Tomcat AS, Linux etc.), information store instances or even deployed hardware instances (e.g. RAID drives).

Any Technology Instance can have attributes associated with it, such as IP address, and these could be used for the URLs and the ports. It is at this level of abstraction that we are capturing the real configuration of specific instances of technology, which is what I think you're looking for.
At this level, we can also capture the specific dependencies that exist between physical instances, e.g. Tomcat A depends on ApacheB and a database on server C.

Depending on how big your physical environment is or how much of it you need to model, there will be a lot of instances in the model but the tool should make this manageable.

I'm not sure any of our out-of-the-box Views will generate the diagram you're looking for, automatically - and at this level of detail we don't use graphical models as there could be connecting lines everywhere! However, it is certainly possible to create a View to produce a diagram for a particular scope - e.g. network domain or particular server

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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