Environment Considerations

When migrating entities, Deployment Management logs on to remote machines in the same way another user would (that is, using FTP, SCP, SSH). Deployment Management can log on to a remote server using any existing operating system user name and password.

We recommend that you generate a new user (for example, OpenText PPM) on every machine to which Deployment Management has access. A user you create for this purpose must have full access to the <PPM_Home> directory on the PPM Server, and read and write permissions on other required directories.

In a Deployment Management scenario, the stream encoding specifies which character encoding scheme OpenText PPM's command execution engine is to use to send and receive commands to a remote computer (via SSH or FTP/SCP). This setting is important if your OpenText PPM instance supports multiple languages, especially in supporting remote executions in IT environments where non-English operating systems are more common.

When configuring an Environment in PPM, the stream encoding for the client (token: CLIENT_STREAM_ENCODING) specifies which encoding the client machine uses and therefore, the encoding that PPM uses in communicating with the client machine.

The stream encoding for the PPM Server (token: SERVER_STREAM_ENCODING) specifies the encoding the server machine uses and, therefore, the encoding that OpenText PPM uses to communicate with that server machine.

This is important if OpenText PPM is installed on a machine whose default encoding is set to, say, UTF-8, but must communicate with remote computers that have, for example, Shift-JIS (a Japanese encoding) or CP-1251 (a Latin encoding) as the default encoding. Having this information known and configured in advance helps OpenText PPM send messages and commands that those machines can correctly interpret and to decode messages that the remote machines return.

The environment definition must include information about the communication protocol to be used to connect to the server or client. For information about connection protocols that OpenText PPM supports, see the System Requirements and Compatibility Matrix and the Deployment Management Configuration Guide.

The environment definition must include information about the transfer protocol to be used to transfer files to or from machines specified in the environment definition. Choose the transfer protocol that best suits your business and technology needs. Consider factors related to security and performance when selecting the transfer protocol. Work with the application administrator to determine which connection protocols are supported for the machines housing the deployment environments.

For information about transfer protocols, see the Deployment Management Configuration Guide.

The OpenText PPM migrators depend on the SERVER_ENV_NAME server configuration parameter. This parameter specifies the name of an environment definition in the OpenText PPM system that describes the host server running that OpenText PPM instance.

When you installed OpenText PPM, the installer automatically defined the KINTANA_SERVER environment. This name is set as the default value of the SERVER_ENV_NAME server configuration parameter. OpenText PPM often refers to this parameter to find the environment definition that contains information about the computer(s) that hosts the PPM Server and database. For this reason, it is important that you keep this server configuration parameter synchronized with the name of the corresponding environment definition, as follows:

SERVER_ENV_NAME=KINTANA_SERVER