System Requirements and Considerations

Before you install Records Management and any of its components, verify that your system meets or exceeds the requirements outlined in this document.

Records Manager Server

*The on-premises deployment of Gimmal Records will be more performative as memory and CPU power are increased.

Other Server Requirements

• .NET Framework 4.8

• .NET Framework 3.5

• Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 or later

• PowerShell 3 or later

Security Best Practices

• Gimmal requires using HTTPS with Gimmal Records for any version of the software. 

• Gimmal recommends that you configure the server to use Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2. See the KB article Enabling TLS 1.2 for more detail.

SharePoint on-Premises Requirement

The 5.2.5 version of the SharePoint Server Connector (SPSC) can be deployed for any of the following versions:

• SharePoint Server 2016

• SharePoint Server 2019

• SharePoint Server Edition (SPSE)

Database Requirements

Effectively managing a database requires familiarity with collation, maintenance plans, recovery models, backups, and techniques for minimizing file system fragmentation, such as creating a database file large enough for any anticipated growth.

SQL Server Versions

• SQL Server 2016 or later

If it is necessary to upgrade from an older version of SQL Server (pre 2016), after you upgrade SQL Server and BEFORE installing the latest version of Gimmal Record Management, verify the SQL Compatibility Level of the “InformationLifecycle “ database  by running the following query:

select compatibility_level from sys.databases where name = 'InformationLifecycle'

This query should return a minimum value of 130.  If this is not the case, refer to the following Microsoft documentation for updating the compatibility level here.

Sizing

The following table shows database sizing estimates in GB. The "m" in the Data File headings represents millions.

Collation

Records Management requires a case insensitive collation as a minimum system requirement for the SQL Server database. The default EN-US collation is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, which meets the Records Management minimum system requirements.

Guidance on collations is available here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143508(v=sql.105).aspx

Maintenance Plans

The Database Administrator should be familiar with tuning and monitoring a SQL Server instance. If there are no efforts made to track database performance over time, it becomes highly likely that database performance may be negatively impacted.

These monitoring efforts should be documented in reports containing empirical information about the database. From these reports, it is possible to construct and maintain a well-designed SQL Server maintenance plan. A SQL maintenance plan is highly recommended for any Records Management implementation.

The plan should address, but not be limited to, the following:

• Index Fragmentation

• Transaction Logs

• Backups/disaster recovery

• VerifyBackups

• Maintenance Plan Cleanup

Database administrators must run the stored procedure ProcBlock_RebuildIndexes to rebuild the Records Manager indexes to improve query performance if they experience slowness.

Message Queue Considerations

Records Management is now using a message queue to improve the performance and reliability of the system.  By default SQL Server is used as the queuing mechanism, but to improve performance and reliability Azure Queues can be used. This works with an Azure Service Bus instance located in your Microsoft Azure account and will distribute work across n number of machines where the service is installed and is configured to listen to the same set of queues. 

To configure your system to use Azure Queues, make the following additions to the <appSettings> section in the config file for both the Lifecycle Processing Service (RecordLion.RecordsManager.ServiceV2.exe.config) and Physical Records Management (RecordLion.RecordsManager.PhysicalAssets.Service.exe.config).

<add key ="rl.queue_type" value="azure"/>
<add key="rl.servicebus_connection_string" value="{service bus connection string}"/> value comes from the azure service bus instance and should include the security information for accessing the service bus
<add key="rl.azure_job_queue_name" value="{queue name}"/> value represents the name of the Queue in the Azure Service Bus Namespace that will be used
<add key="rl.job_worker_count" value="1"/> value represents the number of parallel active messages, please set to 1 unless instructed by Gimmal to increase