Planning a Novell GroupWise® Infrastructure
for Successful Deployment

Tay Kratzer

Novell

Ira Messenger

Novell

High Level Architecture of GroupWise

GroupWise is administered through ConsoleOne®

GroupWise maintains its own directory store

Directory Store is fully replicated

Administration point is the Domain database (WPDOMAIN.DB)

GroupWise

System

eDirectory

MTA Domain

MTA Domain

Post Office

Post

Office

Post Office

Post Office

ConsoleOne

The GroupWise 6.5 Administration Model

Administration Architecture: eDirectory™

Snapins

Understanding the Domain

Collection of Post Offices Components

Directory store (wpdomain.db)

Message Transfer System

MTA

Gateways

Input/Output Queues

Wpcsin/Wpcsout

Mslocal

Administration System

Understanding the Domain

Logically – The Domain is an object in the Tree

eDirectory View

GroupWise System View

Domain Sizing and Configuration

Carefully consider the number of PO’s per Domain

Minimize Rebuilds

Avoid single points of failure

Minimize MTA workload

The Primary Domain should not own any post	offices, gateways, or users. Configure Direct TCP/IP Links

Secondary Domains

Post Offices

Understanding the Post Office

Collection GroupWise Objects

Components of the Post Office

Directory Store (Wphost.db)

Message Transfer System

POA

Input/Output Ques

WPCSIN/WPCSOUT

Information Store

Message Store

User and Message Db’s

Offiles (Attachments)

Document Store

Libraries

Ngwguard.db

Client

Best Practices PO Design

Backup and Restore

Too Many Users

Too much E-mail

Restricting Attachments

Setting Size Limits

LAN/Wan speed and Topology

Maintenance

Clean up Policies

Amount and size of Attachments

Highly Suggested Settings

No more than 1 PO per Server

eMail is Mission Critical

POA designed to “Work Alone”

Configure PO for Client/Server Only Access Mode

Security

Reliability

Configure Client in Caching mode

Increased Performance

Local “Repair Mailbox”

Highly Suggested Settings

Dedicated E-mail Volume

Dedicate a Server to large PO’s

400+ users online mode

2,000+ users caching mode

1 POA Per Post Office

POA should run on same server as post office

Schedule Events

Proactive Maintenance

Analyze/Fix Database

Weekly Expire/Reduce

Reactive Maintenance

Trigger Events

Disk Space Below 200mb

Schedule Repairs to Occur overnight

Server Consolidation

Why Consolidate?

Reduced hardware expense

Reduced administration overhead

Increased administrative responsiveness

Supporting Features

GroupWise Smart Caching mode

Multi-threaded GWCheck

“Live” mode user moves

Disk-space management

GWCheck expire downloaded items

Online Mode vs. Caching Mode
Performance Scalability Thresholds

Lab Results on a Pentium 1266 system

The POA starts to back up at around 570 c/s requests per second

Online mode: the 570/sec mark is around 4700 users

Caching mode: 570/sec is around 14,000 users

With Caching mode, performance thresholds are not your limiting factor

Preparation for Server Consolidation

Deploy GroupWise 6.5 at the POA and all clients

Apply Mailbox Size Limitations

Be generous… just let online users know the space they are taking up

Enforce Caching mode

Run GWCheck with “expire after download” options

Collect Benchmarks

Meaningful Benchmarks to Record

Post office directory size

Time required for backup/restore

Pending Client/Server Requests

Client/Server Requests per unit of time

Server Utilization

Messages in queues

End-user opinion

Be sure to tune the server for best GroupWise performance

TID 10016883, Appendix B

Server Consolidation

Based on your benchmarks, decide how many users you can support on a single server

Consolidate by moving users from multiple post offices to a single post office

The GroupWise 6.x “Live” move process is 4 times faster than the 5.5 move process and is transparent to the end-user

Server Consolidation And The WAN

Configure for Stability

LAN links should be Direct TCP/IP

WAN links should follow WAN topology

One MTA and domain per server

Immediate Purge ON (Queue directories only)

Wpcsin, Wpcsout, Mslocal

Create separate domains for GWIA, Async, and WebAccess and other gateways as necessary

Improvements in GroupWise 6.x

8KB chunk transmission (first appeared in 5.5ep SP2)

Message size-based delay and blocking per link

Message size restriction per user, domain, or post office

Best Practices/System Maintenance

Corporate eMail policy

Set a Retention Policy

eMail purged after 180 days

Use Backup features of GW 6.x

Check and fix the structure of the Information Store nightly.

Check and fix the contents of the information store weekly

Run Expire/Reduce to enforce Retention policy

Best Practices/System Maintenance

Leave “Nightly User Upkeep” enabled

Have it occur early morning, after midnight

Leave Quick finder indexing Enabled

Lock Cleanup Options “Manual delete & Archive”

Set Mailbox size limits

Set Message size limits

Components of WebAccess

WebAccess Application

Runs on NetWare, Linux and Win Server platforms

Runs on a web server as a Java servlet

It is responsible for interacting with the various
web browsers that are used to access the mailbox

Communicates with the WebAccess Agent

WebAccess Agent

Runs on NetWare, Linux and Win Server platforms

Is responsible for retrieving user’s mail from the message store and can be thought of as a “client”

It's the workhorse!

WebAccess Install – Single Server

Apache WebServer

WebAccess Application

WebAccess Agent

GroupWise Domain

Internet

Workstation

Post Office

WebAccess Install – Two Server

Apache WebServer

WebAccess Application

Internet

Workstation

Post Office

WebAccess Agent

GroupWise Domain

Apache WebServer

WebAccess Application

Optimization

Optimizing WebAccess

Add more Agents

Use redirection and failover

WebAccess Agent 1

WebAccess Agent 2

WebAccess Agent 3

Redirection

When a user logs into GroupWise via WebAccess, they need to access the WebAccess Agent nearest their Post Office.

Problem

Performance

Redirection

Why?

Solution

Redirection

During a login, a user connects to a default WebAccess Agent that looks up the user. Associated with the user’s Post Office or Domain is the best WebAccess Agent. The user then connects to GroupWise using this WebAccess Agent.

What is Redirection?

Redirection/Failover – Application WA Agents

Redirection – Define PO WA Agent

Redirection – Building List of Agents

WA Agent 4

WA Agent 3

Web Server

WebAccess Application

WA

Agent 4

User 1

WA Agent 1

Post Office

GroupWise

WA Agent 2

Domain

WA Agent 1

WA Agent 2

WA Agent 4

WA Agent 3

WA Agent 1

WA Agent 2

WA

Agent 3

Redirection – Fault Tolerance

Redirection Provides Fault Tolerance

WA Agent 4

WA Agent 3

Web Server

WebAccess Application

User 1

Post Office

WA Agent 1

WA Agent 2

WA Agent 4

WA Agent 3

WA Agent 1

WA Agent 2

WebAccess Agent Configuration

If configuring for failover, all agent encryption keys must match

Agent Configuration/Post Office Links

Set all Post Office links to C/S only

Ira Messenger

2005-02-09T15:46:22