Thursday, September 24, 2009

Set Up Lotus Domino 8.02 Partitioned Servers on Amazon EC2 - Part I


a snapshot of 4 Domino servers running on 1 Amazon EC2 instance

The purpose of this practice is to find a reliable(over 99.9% up time) and cheap back-up/disaster recovery plan for Lotus Domino systems.

You must have an Amazon account to start your own EC2 and S3 account. Go to Amazon web site, click at "For Developers" at left hand bottom, then click at "Amazon Web Services". Once you get into the Amazon Web Services page, sign up for a free AWS account. Then click at "AWS Management Console" to start your EC2 own journey. Couple hours' digging will only cost you less than $2 (a Windows 2003 instance cost $0.125/hr), so do not afraid to try anything new!

IBM does offer some AMIs on Amazon EC2. However, there is no Lotus Domino pre-installed AMI, therefore, we have to build it from the ground. I will use Windows 2003 server for this practice, I did try the Cent OS 5.3 which was also working fine.

We would like to build four partitioned servers on a single instance, since one instance can only attache one IP, therefor, we will need Port Mapping to share this IP.

What we need -
Basic Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (AMI Id: ami-de4daab7)
100GB EBS Volume for datastore
1 Elastic IP(optional)
Domino Server 8.02



We pick the Small Instance (m1.small) which has
1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
32-bit platform

If you plan to save the image for future use (your own AMI)then don't bother to use the 150GB D drive at all, since the data on D drive won't be saved when creating new image from this instance. Therefore, we need a datastore(a new Volume) created from EBS, I set the size at 100GB according to my case, try not to use the size much bigger than you need because you need to pay for the storage too!

Security Setting -
Before creating your first instance you need to create a new Security Group (mine named W2K3) add some more ports to fit our instance needs


port POP3, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS ports open or not depend on your applications
Port 1352 is the Domino default port
port 1353 - 1356 used by partitioned servers which need port mapping
port 8585 for Domino server remote setup
port 5800/5900 for VNC server
port 3389 for Windows Remote Desktop

You can launch instance now!


Set Up Lotus Domino 8.02 Partitioned Servers on Amazon EC2 - Part II
Set Up Lotus Domino 8.02 Partitioned Servers on Amazon EC2 - Part III

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