Administrator's Guide for Rational ClearCase MultiSite, Release 2002.05.00, All Platforms

2.1 MultiSite Installation

For MultiSite installation instructions, see the Installation Guide for the ClearCase Product Family.

You must install MultiSite on all VOB server hosts where replicated VOBs will reside; replica creation and synchronization imports must occur on the host where the replica resides. You do not need to install MultiSite on your computer to manage mastership, because the MultiSite object mastership commands are available in cleartool. However, you may want to install MultiSite on your computer so you have convenient access to other MultiSite commands. You do not need to install MultiSite on ClearCase client hosts or on server hosts that will not host replicated VOBs.

Each VOB server host where replicas will reside must have enough disk space for the MultiSite storage bay directories. The storage bays hold MultiSite packets, along with their corresponding shipping order files. Table 3 describes the amount of available disk space needed on the disk partition where the storage bay is located.

Table 3 Disk Space Needed for Storage Bay
Type of packet	Disk space needed
replica-creation	Size of VOB database and VOB source pools.
update	On Windows, twice the size of the largest packet to be stored in bay. The reason is that there may be two instances of the same packet in the bay at one time: one on its way to another destination, and another waiting to be applied to the replica on the current host.
update	On UNIX, the size of largest packet to be stored in bay.

There is no specific formula for determining how large your update packets will be. The general rule is that more frequent synchronization results in smaller packets. However, even if you synchronize every hour, a large amount of development activity or release activity can occur in an hour (for example, all of the executables for a release are checked in just before a build, or the release engineer labels all the versions for a release) and can cause a large packet to be generated. If you are not sure that the available disk space can accommodate an unexpectedly large packet, you can configure MultiSite to limit the size of an update packet.

For more information on specifying storage bays, see the shipping.conf (UNIX) and MultiSite Control Panel (Windows) reference pages.