Datazen – Lab Installation

Per my previous post, MS has acquired a BI solution capable of providing dashboards using many different types of data sources. From a System Center perspective, we have been waiting for a scalable solution that meets the performance needs of our customers. Seeing this solution has a very nice look and feel, I was interested in getting my hands on the software to take it for a test drive.

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Reading through the documentation, I noticed that there are many options for scaling this product for a large scale customer. For lab, however, a single server scenario seems like the way to go. Just to make sure this would perform at least OK, I spun up a Basic_A3 VM in Azure (4 cores, 7GB of RAM) and downloaded the product and kicked off the install.

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Since this a single server install, I leave all of the features selected. I do, however, not know how the product will react to the disk caching on the C drive. I decide to leave it as the C drive for lab purposes but would expect to move this off to a different drive if I was doing a production install.

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After reading a little bit about security in from the included PDF, I decide to go with a domain account to run the core services. This is how you would approach the situation if this was a distributed deployment and better follows security best practices.

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The Control Panel for the application (administrative web portal) has a default admin user. The user name is “admin” and here I set the password for that account.

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I want to integrate with AD. I configure this connection to leverage the same service account I created and set to run the core services. In a production install, you would most likely use different accounts.

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I copy off the encryption key and store it in a safe place.

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I copy off the instance ID just in case I decide to add additional servers to the overall install in the future.

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I choose to “Use Core Service credentials” in the next step for simplicity.

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I want this server to host the websites so I leave the host name field blank.

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I configure the Exchange settings so that the service can send emails.

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Install.

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At this point, the install takes quite a while (10-15 minutes) as the necessary windows features are added to the machine and product is ultimately installed.

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Happy dashboarding! The next post will cover getting started with getting a hub set up, creating a data source, and building some views in order to populate the dashboards.

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