Overview

While a single Surveyor server can support a large number of devices (100,000+), Surveyor is designed to scale by dividing services among multiple servers.

Verdiem’s recommended configuration for 110,000 managed devices is a two server configuration.

Information

Web Server

The Web Server is a Windows Server 2008 R2 server that hosts the following:

• Surveyor Power Management Protocol Service
• Surveyor Administrator Service
• Surveyor Message Queue Service

The Web Server should be configured as follows (either physical hardware or a virtualized equivalent):

• At least two dedicated physical server-class processors (Xeon or similar) with eight virtual
• At least 16 GB of RAM
• Server-class performance disk subsystem with 250 GB of storage
• At least two network interfaces (one dedicated for the Web Server to the SQL server connection, the other to support device connection traffic)
  
  

Data Management Server

The Data Management Server is a Windows Server 2008 R2 server that hosts the following:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
• Surveyor Background Task Processor
• Surveyor Advanced Reporting

The Data Management Server should be configured as follows:

• At least two physical server-class processors (Xeon or similar)
• At least 32 GB of RAM
• High-performance disk subsystem with 4 TB of storage to save historical reporting data (less disk space can be used, depending upon report data retention needs).
  
  

Surveyor Network Traffic

A few important points to note about the Surveyor Agent:

• The Surveyor Agent is a compact and efficient service that collects information and enforces policies. Since Surveyor 6 was designed to scale to networks with hundreds of thousands of devices, much attention was dedicated to ensuring its network interactions are infrequent and small in size.

• All communication with the server is outbound from the managed device (Windows or Mac OS X) and inbound to the server. The Surveyor server never contacts a managed device, so no inbound connections are used, which means firewalls on managed devices need no configuration and can be left with the device fully protected.

• The Surveyor Agent uses HTTP protocol and a compact data representation with a minimal amount of network traffic. A single HTTP or HTTPS port must be opened on the server to receive inbound traffic from managed devices.