Product

Snow License Manager

Version

7.0

Date

2014-03-24

This document describes the system setup for the server installations of Snow License
Manager in a Service Provider Edition (SPE) platform with 100 000 registered client
computers

These recommendations apply to the server hardware. For the client requirements, please refer
to the document System Requirements for all Snow products.

This profile applies for:

100 000 inventoried client computers registered in the SPE platform

Server software environment

Snow License Manager
Server 1 (physical or virtual)

Snow Inventory

SQL Server

Server 2 (physical or virtual)

Server 3 (physical or virtual)

Application Server (Snow License Manager)

Component

Minimum requirements

Operating systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64, 2008 R2, 2012, or 2012 R2

Processor

Single Xeon 2.0 GHz Quad Core or equivalent

Disk

100 GB free space minimum

RAM

24 GB or greater

Network card

32-bit, 10/100/1000 MB Ethernet full duplex

Required installed
software

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5

The two roles Application server and Web server should be installed.

Required server
configuration

To enable Snow Update Service to download software updates, HTTP(S)

bidirectional communication needs to be allowed on port 80 or 443.

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Inventory Server (Snow Inventory)

Component

Minimum requirements

Operating systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64, 2008 R2, 2012, or 2012 R2

Processor

Single Xeon 2.0 GHz Quad Core or equivalent

Disk

100 GB free space minimum

RAM

24 GB or greater

Network card

32-bit, 10/100/1000 MB Ethernet full duplex

Required installed
software

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5

The two roles Application server and Web server should be installed.

Required server
configuration

To enable Snow Inventory clients to communicate with the server you need
to specify and open a port (any) to be used (default port TCP 443).

Database Server
Component

Minimum requirements

Database requirements

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, or 2012

Express editions not supported

Operating systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64, 2008 R2, 2012, or 2012 R2

Processor

Dual Xeon 2.0 GHz Quad Core or equivalent

Disk configuration

540 GB disk space

400 GB data files

100 GB log files

40 GB tempdb files
The Snow databases are highly IO-intensive. It is recommended to have at
least 300 IOPS on the disk drives.
If mechanical disk drives are used, it is good practice to keep the data files,
log files, and tempdb files on separate disk drives.
For information on Raid storage configuration - Storage Top 10 Best Practice
(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966534.aspx)

RAM

64 GB or greater

Network card

32-bit, 10/100/1000 MB Ethernet Full Duplex

Required database
configuration

Refer to the section SQL Server Configuration below.

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The following settings need to be set during the SQL Server installation:

The only features that need to be installed are the Database Engine Service and the
Management Tools - Basic. No additional services should be installed, since these
consume system resources.

Security mode should be Mixed, to allow both Windows Authentication and SQL Logins.

Data files, log files, and tempdb files should be configured to use separate drives, as
described in the table Database Server above.

Case sensitive collations not supported.

The following settings should be set on the databases SNOWDB and SnowLicenseManager:

Recovery model should be set to simple.

The autoshrink option should be set to false. The Snow update job automatically shrinks
the databases.

For optimal performance, the maximum memory allocation should be set to 85-90% of the total
RAM. This can be adjusted in the Management Studio by following this procedure:
1. In Object Explorer, right-click the server and select Properties.
2. Select the page Memory.
3. Under Server Memory Options, enter the amount that you want for the Maximum
server memory (85-90% of total RAM).

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For optimal performance, two settings related to parallelism also need to be adjusted in the
Management Studio.
1. Select the page Advanced.
2. Under Parallelism, do the following:

Set the Cost Threshold for Parallelism value to 50.

For assistance with fine-tuning of this value, please contact Snow Software.

Check that Max Degree of Parallelism is not set to 1, which prohibits parallelism.
The value should be set either to 0 or to N-1, where N is the number of
processors.

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It is required that backup of the two databases SNOWDB and SnowLicenseManager is

performed on a daily basis. The recommended time of the day to do this backup is 2 hours prior
to the scheduled data update job. It is highly recommended to store the backup on a different
physical location than the database server itself.

It is highly recommended to have a specific server dedicated to testing. This server should have a
setup identical to the production environment. The test server could be used to evaluate new
versions and upgrades before they are put in production.

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