Replication Survey - Red Hat DIRECTORY SERVER 7.1 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual

Defining a Replication Strategy
Once you understand your replication strategy, you can start deploying your
directory. This is a case where deploying your service in stages will pay large
dividends. By placing your directory into production in stages, you can get a
better sense of the loads that your enterprise places on your directory. Unless you
can base your load analysis on an already operating directory, be prepared to alter
your directory as you develop a better understanding on how your directory is
used.
The following sections describe in more detail the factors affecting your
replication strategy:
•

Replication Survey

• Replication Resource Requirements
• Fractional Replication
• Replication across a Wide-Area Network
• Using Replication for High Availability
• Using Replication for Local Availability
• Using Replication for Load Balancing
• Example Replication Strategy for a Small Site
• Example Replication Strategy for a Large Site
Replication Survey
The type of information you need to gather from your survey to help you define
your replication strategy includes:
• Quality of the LANs and WANs connecting different buildings or remote
sites and the amount of available bandwidth.
• Physical location of users, how many users are at each site, and what is their
activity.
• The number of applications that access the directory and relative percentage
of read/search/compare operations to write operations.
If your messaging server uses the directory, you need to know how many
operations it performs for each email message it handles. Other products that
rely on the directory are typically products such as authentication
applications or meta-directory applications. For each one, you must find out
the type and frequency of operations that are performed in the directory.
126 Red Hat Directory Server Deployment Guide • May 2005