Is that a good idea to separate applications into different servers?

[SherryX]

We currently planning to migrate all applications to new servers.

Now Jira/Confluence and Crucible(with FishEye) are in one server, is that a good idea to migrate these three applications into 3 different servers?

I think Crucible/FishEye probably better off, but there are a lot of communications between Jira and Confluence, will that cause any issues?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The only downsides I can see are

1. Slightly slower communications between the services, as it'll be over a network instead of local. If your servers are in the same datacentre, I doubt you'll even be able to measure it though.
2. Less space in the data centre/room, as 3 servers are larger than one, and a slightly higher consumption of power. I want to work the word "negligible" into that sentence somehow.
3. A small overhead in having to install/maintain 3 servers instead of one.

I think the benefits in terms of flexibilty, expansibilty and stabilty significantly outweigh the problems. You'll certainly have a win if your three servers allow your services to have more resources.

[Adam Myatt]

Sherry - you also need to understand how many users you have as this can dramatically affect how you size your environment hardware. By the nature of the product Jira tends to be more high traffic than Confluence and FECRU. Confluence tends to use more memory due to a great internal content caching scheme to improve performance. Crucible tends to use a lot of CPU and Network IO due to the SCM repository scanning. These are just broad observations of course, so you need to factor them in for your user base.

Additionally, if you have App Links configured between the products you will most likely need to redo all of those, though that depends on your Hostname and URL context scheme.

Do you plan to proxying all requests through an Apache HTTPD instance to reverse proxy and hide the ports, and/or enable HTTPS?

Also, as you move them into separate servers are you using the embedded databases for some products or external standalone databases like Oracle?

An additional thing to consider is your backup and disaster recovery plan. If you now have 3 servers instead of 1, you will need to ensure you get file system backups of all three , including DB backups of 3 databases now. Fisheye stores the repository info and configuration in an XML file on the file system, so file system backups are important, where Crucible stores the project and code review info in the database.

[SherryX]

Thanks, Adam. JIRA/Confluence have been moved into test enviroment and seems OK, we use MySQL and Apache HTTPD to reverse proxy and hide the ports, but no https (not sure how to do it yet).

For backup and disaster recovery, our server administrator already consider the situation, as they take care of the backups. Thanks for your information.

[Adam Saint-Prix]

If you have the hardware, it's not a bad idea to separate these onto different servers. If nothing else, if a server goes down, then you only lose one application. In general, having a dedicated server also allows you to dedicate additional resources at the individual application and could allow you to handle scaling issues more skillfully.

I don't see a downside, other than having to manage multiple boxes and the initial work involved with getting things setup. From a performance standpoint, I'm guessing you'd see some substantial gains going the separate server per app route.