Planning for deploying HCL OneDB

Before you deploy HCL OneDB™, you should decide what you want to include in your deployment and how to configure the target server.

On the source server, you create a snapshot of the database server and, optionally, of the data in the database. Before you create a snapshot, decide on the properties of the snapshot. When you run the ifxdeployassistant utility in GUI mode, you can choose the following properties of the snapshot:

  • The server features and components to include. You can choose which features and components to include in the snapshot. By default, all features and components are included in the snapshot.
  • The data to include. You can create snapshots of your dbspaces. When you deploy them to the target computer, the dbspaces are already initialized. By default, no dbspaces are included in the snapshot.
  • The archive format. You can choose one of three tar archive formats with or without compression, or a zip archive with compression. By default, the format is a tar archive with Gzip compression.

On the target server, you deploy the snapshot of the server and any dbspaces and configure the environment. Before you deploy the snapshot, decide on the properties of the target server:

  • Where to put the server. If there is no HCL OneDB installation on the machine, you can deploy a new installation using an archive of the INFORMIXDIR directory from your source machine. You can deploy with the following command:
    ifxdeploy  -INSTALL -i informixdir --snapshot archive_file
    The archive_file is uncompressed in the directory specified by the -i parameter or the INFORMIXDIR environment variable.
  • Where to put the data. If you create snapshots of the data, and all the dbspaces are in a single file and are deployed to a single directory, then you can use the --image_archive archive_file,dest_directory option for ifxdeploy to create the directory and uncompress the snapshot for you. If your dbspaces will be in multiple directories then you must create directories for the dbspaces yourself, set the proper ownership and permissions, and extract the snapshot contents into the directories. By default, the ifxdeploy utility uses the same directories as on the source server. You can instruct the server to use new directories with the --relocate option in the ifxdeploy command.
  • The configuration of the environment. You must set the INFORMIXDIR, INFORMIXSERVER, and password values when you run the ifxdeploy command. You can set other server properties.
  • The configuration of the server. You can customize the configuration parameters for the target server. By default, an onconfig file is created based on the onconfig.std file. You can specify a different onconfig file with the -o option of the ifxdeploy command.