Helix Core Server Administrator Guide: Multi-Site Deployment (2019.2)

Introduction to multi-site deployment architectures

Helix Core Server Administrator Guide: Fundamentals explains how you create, configure, and maintain a single Helix Core server. Small organizations often find a single server is adequate to meet user needs. However, as the business grows and usage expands in scale and geography, many organizations deploy a more powerful server-side infrastructure.

Distributed architectures

Architecture	Advantage	Disadvantage
Commit-edge	best performance overall because most commands are local an edge server that is used only for automated processing, such as builds, can be deployed without a backup/recovery solution because the edge local data is critical only during build-time.	cannot be used as a warm standby requires machine provisioning and administration, including backups of each edge (except in the case of a build edge server)
Forwarding replica Note A master is a standard server type that doesn't support edge servers.	customizable filtering supports "daisy chaining" to additional sites. For example, a site in the Philippines might forward to a site in Taiwan that forwards to a site in Japan that forwards to the Master in France. This alternative to directly connecting each Asian site to Europe: reduces the metadata replication load on the master server reduces the amount of data traveling across the WAN from Europe to Asia For more information, see the Knowledge Base article on server-to-server arrangements, "Helix replication rules".	"write" commands are slower because local metadata must be pulled from the master requires machine provisioning and administration. See Configuring a forwarding replica. Tip Starting with 2018.2, we recommend a standby server with rpl.journalcopy.location=1 for high availability and disaster recovery.
Edge-to-edge chaining	Any number of edge servers can be chained together If your organization is geographically dispersed, the configuration might allow all users to have an edge server nearby Filtering	The longer the chain, the longer it takes to complete replication The outermost edge experiences the most latency

Helix Broker	Supports the following: allow a command to pass, reject a command (for example, if the options are incorrect), redirect a command to another server, filter commands, respond to a command. (See Command handler specifications) When the p4d process is offline for maintenance, the broker can display a message such as "This server is undergoing maintenance", which is more user-friendly than a TCP connect error. Tip Note that during the Failover process, such a message is visible to the end-users without using a broker.	Broker layer affects network performance Forwarding replicas and edge servers are more recent technology and are an alternative to P4Broker redirection. See the Support Knowledgebase article, "Using P4Broker to redirect read-only commands". Command "triggers" are an alternative to some traditional broker uses cases. See "Triggering before or after commands".
Helix Proxy	easy to install, configure, and maintain improves performance by caching frequently transmitted file revisions reduces demand on the Perforce service and the network over which it runs no need to back up the proxy cache especially beneficial with larger files	not optimal for syncing large numbers of small files Tip A proxy cannot be deployed in front of a forwarding replica See the Support Knowledgbase article on Proxy Performance.

Services assignment

To assign a service to a server, the administrator uses the Services: field that appears with the p4 server command:

Tip

For additional details, see:

How replica types handle requests
the Support Knowledgebase article, "Replica Types and Use Cases"

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