Deployment Overview

This section describes in the usual deployment scheme of ESM. All major components and their purposes are introduced. The following figure shows the standard deployment scheme.

Physically separate deployment environments – workstation, application server and database server — are indicated by dashed lines. These should be located on physically separate computers.

The required platform components are as follows:

• Web/Application Server – ESM is deployed with the Web/Application server. This component receives HTTP messages from the Client and provides basic Java environment for ESM. It also provides the HTTP response produced by ESM for the Client.
• Java® JRE – Efecte is and Web/Application servers are Java applications and require a functioning Java runtime environment.
• Database – Database is used as information storage by ESM. Database is accessed through database drivers. Database should be deployed to a separate server, e.g. a shared database center.
• Web Client – A web browser that is used as a graphical user interface to ESM. Browser software is deployed on end user workstations. No other client software is needed.

Virtual Environments

Efecte Service Management (ESM) platform can be installed and used on virtual environments. Installations in a virtual environment must confirm to the same supported environments guidelines as the supported ESM installations in a non-virtual environment. It is important to make sure, that the ESM installation in a virtual environment gets the recommended amount of resources to prevent any performance or other issues.

It is Efecte’s intent to make commercially reasonable efforts to provide support for installations that are run in virtual environments. This support is subject to Efecte’s support and service agreements and to specific constraints that may be documented in release notes, customer bulletins, or other documentation.

Efecte will accept problem reports for installations in virtual environments and they will be handled like any other problem report like the Efecte support and service agreements describe. However, if after all other means of reproducing the problem have been used (problem has been attempted to reproduce in a test environment with steps given by customer, using customer’s ESM configuration [exported using ESM’s configuration export functionality] and the problem has been investigated in the customer’s environment using remote connections) and the problem has not still been reproduced, we reserve the right to request customer assistance in problem determination, including recreating the problem in a non-virtual environment.

Those reported defects found to be unique to a virtual environment or not reproducible within a non-virtual environment will be addressed at the discretion of Efecte. Defects requiring time and resources beyond commercially reasonable effort may not be addressed.

Hardware Requirements

All the following configurations describe one production server (or test/development accordingly) which either is one physical server with a number of CPUs or one virtual server which is allocated the appropriate amount of virtual CPUs.

ESM supports the following processor architectures:

• x86-64 (64-bit)

In addition, the following recommended minimum CPU/memory configurations per intended use of ESM apply:

Total RAM memory is the total RAM memory the server has (or has been allocated to if it’s a virtual one).

RAM Allocated to JVM is the amount of RAM allocated to Java Virtual Machine in the Application server settings.

Integrations, mail tasks and imports, which strain the performance level of ESM, should be taken into account in the following way:

• Add 1 concurrent user for each separate mail task configured in ESM.
• Add 5 concurrent users for each separate import unless importing takes place in low use times, such as night time.
• Add 1 concurrent user for each separate integration.

It is also recommended that the server CPU and memory capacity can be expanded in case of increased use in the future. ESM supports multiple processors and processor cores by allowing concurrent execution of web client requests. The above table lists only recommendations for Intel processor architecture; servers with AMD architecture should be chosen to have equal performance with the above recommended configurations. 

Operating System Requirements

Supported operating systems are listed in the table below:

Customer must provide a physical server and operating system before ESM can be implemented.

Supported Database Servers

The following table lists supported database servers.

Multi-Language Support

The user interfaces of ESM supports several languages. For the comprehensive list of supported languages, check the Service Management Solution Description.

The user interface language can be changed by using the user preferences at any time during the operation of ESM. Note: This does not include the configurations built on top of the ESM product but only the UI dialogs of the product.

Data card templates as well as the rest of the configuration are installed in English by default.

Web Client

Standard web browser software is used as the client in ESM. All product functionality is accessed using the browser software.

Supported Web Browsers

ESM support the following browsers:

All parts of the user interface, except administrative user interface:

• Google Chrome (latest)
• Mozilla Firefox (latest)
• Microsoft Edge Chromium (latest)
• Safari (latest)
• Mobile browsers: 
  • Android - Chrome (latest)
  • iOS - Safari (latest)

Administrative user interface: 

• Microsoft Edge Chromium (latest)
• Chrome (latest)

JavaScript and cookies must both be enabled.

Browser Plugins Are Not Supported

Browser plugins are not supported with Efecte Service Management Tool. They might change how functionalities are seen on the UI (web browser) or even prevent certain data from being shown.

Supported Mobile Platforms

• Android - Two latest major releases.
• IOS - Two latest major releases.

Administrative user interface is not supported on mobile platforms. Some advanced features of the end-user interface are also not supported. For example, it’s not possible to create views on mobile devices, and advanced searches are not supported on mobile devices. The dashboard view type is not supported on mobile devices. The user interface layout is also different than on workstation environment.

Recommended Display Resolution

For the best user experience we recommend 1680x1050 or higher resolution.

Recommended Workstation Hardware

The recommended amount of memory on a workstation is 8GB minimum. Usually multiple programs are running simultaneously on the workstation and it’s important to make sure the browser running ESM application has enough free memory.

Different browsers also tend to use memory differently, so it’s hard to give an exact guideline on how much memory ESM application may use when the browser is running. This memory consumption may be hundreds of megabytes on some occasions, especially in heavy use.

Other Technical Requirements

This section lists further supported environments for some of the features used in Efecte.

E-mail Server

An E-mail server is used by ESM to send and receive e-mail messages and attachments. ESM supports the following e-mail servers:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2016
• Microsoft Office 365

When connecting to the e-mail server, the following e-mail protocols are supported:

• SMTP (Support also for SSL or TLS encryption.)
• POP3 (Support also for SSL encryption.)
• IMAP4 (Support also for SSL or TLS encryption.)

E-mail service supports the following encoding conventions:

• Unicode
• ISO/IEC 8859
• ISO-8859-1
• UTF-8
• UTF-7

Authentication Server

An external authentication server can be used to authenticate users of ESM using LDAP Bind. The following authentication services are supported:

• Microsoft Active Directory

Windows Domain Single Sign on (SSO)

Efecte supports SSO in Windows domains by using the NTLM, NTLMv2 and Kerberos protocols. NTLMv2 and Kerberos support only authentication from a single domain.

For Linux versions Kerberos is not supported.

Microsoft SCCM Connector

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is a solution to comprehensively assess, deploy, and update your servers, clients, and devices—across physical, virtual, distributed, and mobile environments. With Efecte SCCM Connector the Asset Intelligence information for hardware and software can be imported in to Efecte.

Support for latest publicly available Microsoft SCCM Current branch -version is verified one week before release process of official Efecte Service Management starts.

Check Efecte's SCCM documentation for more information.