Determining a Tenancy Strategy

Determine how many domains to create and how to distribute domain components. A strategic multitenant structure for the cluster balances system-availability considerations with administrative concerns.

Domains are primarly containers for packages for a specific group. This group is called a tenant and can be internal to a single organization or external (for example, a hosted mobility environment).

Packages are attached to named security configurations that determine which users have access to mobile business object data, so you must create at least one security configuration and assign it to the domain for which the package is being deployed. You must identify which users require access to each package and how you will distribute the packages across the system using domains to logically partition the environment.

  1. Organize device users according to the data they need to access. Ideally, create a domain for each distinct set of users who access the same applications and authenticate against the same back-end security systems. If you do not need to support multiple groups in distinct partitions, then the single default domain should suffice.
  2. Consider how these groups will be affected by administrative operations that prevent them from synchronizing data. Sometimes, you can limit the number of users affected by administration and maintenance disruptions by distributing packages across additional domains. Operationally, the more components a domain contains, the more clients who are unable to access package data during administrative operations like domain synchronizations.
  3. Assess the administrative resources of the tenant to determine how much time can be committed to domain administration tasks. Certain multitenant configurations require a greater amount of administrative time. For example, if you distribute packages from the same EIS across a number of domains, you must maintain identical data source configurations for each of these packages. This option requires more administrative time than grouping all packages belonging to the same EIS into one domain.
  4. Decide how many domains to create for the customer, and identify which packages to group within each domain, according to the needs of the user groups you identified in step 1.