Setup Guide - Part 1: Environment – Kepion Support Center

Welcome to the Kepion Setup Guide series. In the first article, we'll give an overview of what a typical Kepion environment looks like, check the permissions needed, and make sure we understand the components necessary to setup Kepion.

Kepion Environment

Before we begin, it's important to understand the structure of a typical Kepion environment. It generally consists of three key components and two service accounts. It's up to you whether you want to configure these components on the same machine, or separate ones.

The components are:

SQL Server: Where the relational SQL Database Engine is installed.
SSAS Server: Where the SQL Server Analysis Services is installed.
Web Server: Where the IIS is running.

And the two service identities are:

Kepion SI: A credential which determines the running context for the Web Server. It is recommended to create a dedicated domain account as the Kepion SI.
SSAS SI: A credential which determines the running context for the SSAS Server.

The latter of which may already be configured in your environment if you're using a SQL and SSAS server. In either case, we'll cover the steps to configure everything above in more detail later on in this series.

Permissions

The first thing you should check before you begin to install Kepion is that you have the necessary permissions to configure these components across the various servers within the environment.

Machine	Permission	Description
Web Server	Machine Administrator	Need to be an admin on the Web Server to install to IIS.
SQL Server	SysAdmin	Need to be an admin on the SQL Server in order to add the Kepion SI login.
SSAS Server	SSAS Administrator	Need to be an admin on the SSAS Server in order to add the Kepion SI as an admin.

Web Server (IIS)

The following highlighted server roles will be enabled after installing Kepion. You do not need to configure anything at this point.

Memory

It's important to review the memory configuration on both the SQL and SSAS servers to ensure an adequate amount of memory is available in the environment.

By default, SQL and SSAS servers consume all available memory on a server. This can lead to unexpected behavior and poor performance if not properly restricted.

The table below provides recommendations for memory allocation in a typical environment. If each server is on its own machine, ensure that the host OS also has at least 2 GB of memory.

Production Environment

Number of Users	Web Server	SQL Server	SSAS Server
Small < 10	2+ GB	4+ GB	4+ GB
Medium < 50	4+ GB	6+ GB	6+ GB
Large > 50	6+ GB	8+ GB	8+ GB

Development Environment

Number of Users	Web Server	SQL Server	SSAS Server
Small < 10	2+ GB	3+ GB	3+ GB

We'll go over the details of restricting memory for SQL and SSAS later on in this series.

Kepion Service Identity

Now let's take a closer look at choosing our Kepion SI, and the permissions it will need to interact with the SQL and SSAS servers.

The first thing we need to do is determine a credential to use for the Kepion SI. Typically there are two choices:

Use your own credential - generally in the form DOMAIN\USERNAME. This is acceptable to do if you're working in a development environment and have sysadmin privileges.

Create a new credential - which you'll likely have to request to be created on your domain (e.g., corp\kepionSI, corp\svc_kepion, etc.) If you are setting a production environment, it is recommended to have a dedicated credential for your Kepion SI.

Next, let's look at the permissions you'll need on each of the three components:

Web Server

The Kepion SI credential will be used as the identity of the Web Server. This will be configured using the Kepion Configuration Wizard in the following steps.

SQL Server

A SQL login will be required for the Kepion SI on the SQL Server. This login will need permissions such as dbcreator on the server and db_owner for all Kepion Databases. This will be setup in Part 2.

SSAS Server

The Kepion SI will need to be added to the Server Administrators on the SSAS server in order to allow Kepion to generate new OLAP databases.

SSAS Service Identity

As previously mentioned, the SSAS SI will only need permissions on the SQL server to function correctly. We'll configure this credential, along with the Kepion SI, in the next step.

Next Steps

You should now have a better understanding of the three components (the Web Server, SQL Server, and SSAS Server) and the two credentials (Kepion SI and SSAS SI) necessary to setup a Kepion environment.

In the next article, we'll walk through the steps of configuring the SQL server. This will include ensuring that our Kepion SI and SSAS SI have the permissions required to interact with the SQL server, in addition to restricting its memory.