What is the physical design of a deployment

This section provides information about the physical design of the recommended deployment scenarios. It presents the network topology of the deployment and describes the servers in the development, Content Management, and Content Delivery tiers.

In the recommended deployment scenario, the production environment consists of three tiers. Internal business users belong to a separate domain, the corporate network, and external site visitors access the deployment over the Internet.

You can create four separate network segments for the following tiers:

The internal development/test/business management tier has a separate domain. Set up a domain trust with the staging tier to stage content from the test tier to the staging tier.

The data tier is a collection of clustered computers that are running SQL Server, MongoDB, a business management server, and an Active Directory service domain controller. A firewall helps protect these servers from access from the Web tier, in the event that a malicious user manages to compromise the Web tier. Another firewall protects the database servers against access from the internal development/test/business management tier to prevent internal users from accidentally overwriting run-time data and disrupting run-time operations.

The Web tier consists of two Web servers and an Active Directory domain controller. A firewall/load balancer helps protect the deployment from malicious users on the Internet, and a firewall protects the Active Directory domain controller and the data tier from malicious users who might manage to compromise the Web tier.

The staging tier is a computer that is running SQL Server and a business management server. This tier belongs to the same domain as the database servers. This tier stages data from the internal development/test/business management tier to the run-time environment. The business management server in this tier runs the Catalog and Inventory Web service, the Marketing Web service, and the Orders Web service.

The internal development/test/business management tier is a computer that is running SQL Server, MongoDB, a business management server, and an Active Directory domain controller. In this tier you can conduct pre-production development and testing. Business users can connect to the data-tier business management server, and to the Web services that are running on the staging server from this tier.