Accudemia Server Requirements for Self Hosting

If you're thinking of hosting Accudemia on your own servers, you must take into account that additional software might be required. Also, depending on the installation there might be different requirements, such as a dedicated firewall or a load balancing server; it all depends on the size of your institution and the performance and security requirements you might have. Please ask your system administrator for more information on this topic.

Also, other free software might need to be installed. If you already have licenses of other versions or editions of the products listed below, please contact us to know if they're supported. Some limitations might apply, or some features might not be available. Installation and support fees might vary if other software is used.

The server hardware requirements depend on the server load.

Hardware

It will depend on the amount of concurrent users.

Component Requirement
Processor Minimum Processor type: AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T support, Intel Pentium IV with EM64T support.
Recommended Processor type: Quad-Core Processor.
Recommended Processor speed: 2.0 GHz or faster
Memory Minimum: 4 GB
Recommended: 8 GB or more
Hard Disk Recommended: RAID 5 – 500 GB Free disk space
Firewall Server A stand-alone firewall server is recommended to reduce the load in the application servers.

Software

Component Requirement
Operating System Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit x64 (or newer)
Database Server SQL Server 2012 R2 (or newer) Standard Edition, with the following features installed
- Database Engine
Services: SQL Reporting Services, Full-Text Search
- Client Tools Conectivity
- Integration Services
- Client Tools Backward Compatibility
Additional Software Your own backup and recovery plan and software.
SSL Certificate installed
7zip - http://www.7-zip.org/
Mozilla Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Araxis Merge (or WinMerge)
An Amazon AWS account for sending emails (recommended), or an email server (other than the Windows one) – ie: Mail Enable, MDeamon.
Windows Remote Desktop
Optional: Virtual CloneDrive if installing from ISO images is required.
Optional: SQLite Manager add-on for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/

Information Prior to Install

In order to perform the installation, our team will need the following tools working. Also, you need to provide us the following information:

If the SQL Server is in another computer:

Details Example
Windows Remote Desktop access
Administrator password your_password
SQL Server location and instance name server123\SQL2008
SQL Server ‘sa’ password or administrator access your_password
Address of a shared folder where the SQL Server is located \\server123\Shared
Domain name of the Accudemia server accudemia.yourcollege.edu
Addresses of the SQL Report Server http://server123:89/ReportServer and http://server123:89/Reports

If the SQL Server is in in the same server:

Details Example
Administrator password your_password
SQL Server ‘sa’ password or administrator access your_password
Domain name of the Accudemia server accudemia.yourcollege.edu

Before the installation you need to have the following things ready:

  • SSL Certificate
  • Mail Server
  • IIS
  • SQL Server
  • SQL Reporting Services

Working on the above or supporting it is not included in our standard installation service. If you want us to work on any of these items, additional fees will apply. Contact us for a quote.

Email Delivery Options

Accudemia supports different methods to deliver emails:

1) Using our own email server: We do this work when installing Accudemia, using Mail Enable. You only need to unblock the connections in your firewall in order to allow Mail Enable to work.

2) Using an external SMTP server: This option requires that you send us a SMTP server that requires username and password, but not encryption. Those requirements are pretty common, for example we could configure Accudemia to deliver emails through Hotmail! Test SMTP authentication and send emails using Telnet

3) Using Amazon AWS SES: This service allows to send emails in a fast and reliable manner. You only need to set up an Amazon account and configure it. You will also need to unblock the outbound connections to Amazon.

Either way, make sure to allow the connections in your firewall. If there are any firewalls blocking the connection, we won't be able to set up the emails.

IMPORTANT:

If there's any configuration missing or software not installed, additional charges might apply. Emails must be working before we start the installation.

Pre-Installation Checklist