RMS Enterprise hosted in the cloud.

syslock

Has anyone hosted RMS in a VPS and if so can you give the details please:

VPS Specs

OS used

Hosting service used.

PhreaK

Sure have, in fact you'll find a lot of deployments prefer to use a virtual machine for running the RMS server. As long as this virtualised environment matches the requirements specified for RMS you will be all good (these are all in the RMS Installation Guide). At the time of writing RMS is tested and supported for operation on VMware ESXi (4.x or greater) and Hyper-V hosts. Whether these virtual machines are located within a client's internal network infrastructure, or externally does not matter. All that matters is that the minimum requirements are met and you can achieve the required network communication between your RMS clients (NI masters), the RMS server(s) and the services your server will be configured to interface with (LDAP, SMTP etc).

For the client -> server communication this is where RMS Enterprise and the v4.x SDK really shines. All clients communicate via a RESTful API. This is the exact type of traffic the majority of virtual hosting providers have engineered their platforms for.

Now, for the cons. The major one is that you have now introduced a whole bunch of additional network complexity between your clients and your server - a lot of which neither you, nor the client has ownership of. If service availability is of a concern this may be a deal breaker. If the pipe to this external provider goes down, you've lost all monitoring and data acquisition. If there are internal issues within the provider you've lost all monitoring and data acquisition. If the provider has a service outage you've lost all monitoring and data acquisition etc. However, the flexibility, reduced setup, operating costs and overheads a 'cloud' based solution provides may outweigh this. As an integrator its ultimately up to you to specify the optimum solution for the deployment requirements. RMS has the flexibility to provide you these options though.


TL;DR
Virtual hosts work great (including external aka cloud), however remember the hosting platform is just one component of the overall solution.

syslock

Thanks for the response, straight after posting the initial question I read the answer in the installation guide.

[Deleted User]

I know this is an old thread, but just adding a comment that RMS is now available as a hosted service directly from AMX. Press release: http://www.amx.com/includes/pressrelease-file.asp?release=2013.6.12.f