jueves, 26 de agosto de 2010

Openbravo Cloud Appliance. Using it effectively

The other day a customer running a Cloud appliance needed to replicate its production environment into 3 new servers. These were the options

  1. Deploy Openbravo ERP by doing a custom installation in the 3 servers and then move the actual installation to these 3 new servers.
  2. Deploy Openbravo ERP using a community appliance and then move the actual installation to the 3 new servers.

Using an appliance for deployment makes things not just quicker but a lot easier for the system integrator. You won’t just save some hours deploying each new server, but you will also be sure that everything is well configured and optimized.

Similar reasons apply to the task of moving the actual instance (database + modules) to the servers. It’s a time consuming task, moreover when you need to repeat it three times. There are a lot of manual commands to be executed and mistakes can happen. Even doing the steps correctly, this task for the 3 servers should take around 2 working days.

But, as the customer was using the Openbravo Professional Edition, they had the Cloud appliance up and running.


This made much easier the replication of the environment. The Cloud Appliance does not introduce improvements in the deployment of Openbravo ERP compared to the community appliance, but provides significant advantages to Professional Edition Subscribers managing the instance, as the steps went down to these:

  1. Download the last backup from the production environment
  2. Upload it to each 3 servers
  3. In each server click on Restore that backup.

As you can see, the Openbravo Cloud Appliance (manual) does not only allow you to spend more effectively your time maintaining your instance, but also avoids unexpected errors and problems in these critical manual tasks.

In the end, the replication of the original environment in 3 (counting that they all use the Professional Edition) was done in less than 4 hours.