Hi Arphy,
Tried to be as helpful as possible, some of what I've outlined below is really basic and you might already be familiar with a lot of it, so my apologies if you are further along than me and everything in my wall of text below is obvious and not helpful to you.
I read your original post and got flashbacks to when we were getting started and all the myriad of problems we were encountering every single day and wanted desperately to try and spare someone those headaches. Hope it helps you!
Existing Documentation
The documentation on this is not great as near as I can tell. We're in the same boat actually, I only started recently myself, getting to grips with Blue Prism itself but at the same time no one around me has specialist knowledge about how to set up the environments in terms of physical infrastructure.
There is some documentation around how these things should run but the details on hardware requirements or a step-by-step is not really there. I assume this is because it is assumed whoever is setting up the server etc. already knows what they're doing and not because IT people are bad about documenting things... ;-)
This Forum and Hardware / Setting Up Servers
I think there will be a few people watching this thread (like me) hoping you solve the problem for us and can shed light on it in a Newbie-Friendly way. Most of the discussion on this subject I've seen has been people referring other people to a manual and leaving it at that. The manuals themselves are sparse on detail and assume an awful lot of knowledge. Some of the more 'specific' recommendations are so incredibly vague as to be useless and they don't specify anything. I am referring to hardware requirements for hosting a VM specifically, just says 'Intel Xeon Quad' but doesn't state how many VMs or if it's a single one or what make/model of CPU etc. etc. I'm a PC hardware hobbyist so that bugs me more than it really should! :)
My Company's Infrastructure - Application Server and Database
With hosting Blue Prism services, everything has to be done on a Windows Server. The database which backs up the production environment must be a Microsoft SQL server DB. It is highly recommended to have 2 or 3 environments for DEV, Testing and PROD. For PROD at least, it is useful to have a mirror of the DB someplace else so you can run queries on it without worrying about bottlenecking the production DB server.
In terms of setting up the environment, we're using a dedicated Application server running on a virtual machine (VM) on a server, this connects to a Microsoft SQL DB on another virtual machine containing the Database (DB) for Blue Prism. For production we have a second database set up as a mirror of the production DB.
So Application server, DB server. And a second DB server for the Production environment.
We have 4 environments running on different VMs hosting Blue Prism application servers. One for DEV, Testing, QA and PROD.
Don't know how to set them up myself, we requested our IT guys to do it.
They did so and gave us a domain, the type of connection and the port to use. We configured our environments accordingly in BP (before you sign in there is the 'Configure' button.
Out of scope of your original question but there is a lot of best practice stuff around how to import/export processes from one environment to another, distinguishing between production and test versions of applications, separating processing into 3 (load/process/report) and a million other things as well but this is already a giant post so I won't add more to this than I have already!
More specific things about Windows Server/Blue Prism set up, I'm not really 100% on but if there's something you're not sure on, I'll try and help you out as best I can.
Run Time Resources (RTR)
We're not using VMs for the RTRs. Instead we have a bunch of dell towers running windows, i5 processors (i5 6500) with 4GB of RAM and hard drives with a few hundred GB of storage. The hard drives are overkill but they're physical PCs and that's what they have.
If you're using VMs you won't need anywhere near that much dedicated storage, would recommend 4GB of RAM minimum, more depending on the workload (especially if you're running a 64 bit OS). 4 cores at 2.6 GHz seems like a reasonable place to start for running a VM as an RTR.
One major pain we had was figuring out how to set up the listener on the RTR. This is what is constantly communicating with the Application Server to let the App Server Control Room know if that resources is currently idle/logged in/ working on a process and is also how the Control Room tells the BOT logged into the PC what to do.
Unrelated But Useful Addition
If you haven't already. look into using LoginAgent. It's got a bunch of objects you can use for logging into RTRs without actually using remote desktop. If you have another solution for this I'd be curious about what you've found.
Some Similar Threads with People looking for similar basic info
Has info and some recommendations for CPU/RAM other hardwarehttps://portal.blueprism.com/forums/tech-chat/general-blue-prism-discussion/recommended-system-configuration-rtr#comment-32360
Has links to basic documentation:https://portal.blueprism.com/forums/technical-queries/faq-hints-tips/minimum-system-requirements
Recommendations/Best Practice for when the number of BOTs increase (not directly relevant but useful if you're as new as I was just a few months ago)https://portal.blueprism.com/forums/tech-chat/general-blue-prism-discussion/best-practices-take-care-environment-and-process
Has a ton of links another forum user called AmiBarrett had for the BP Installationhttps://portal.blueprism.com/forums/tech-chat/general-blue-prism-discussion/blue-prism-infrastructure-reference-guide-enterprise
Has some info on the environments some other Centres of Excellence are running:https://portal.blueprism.com/forums/technical-queries/general/server-specifications-application-server-ms-sql-db-3-5-active
I am also very interested to hear how you're getting on with this. If you have any specific questions I'll keep an eye on this thread and try to help as best I can (but like you I'm new to this so might not be able to help much)
Kind regards,
Ben
