Serena Release Automation employs the cold standby HA strategy for the application tier. When the primary system fails, the cold standby is brought online and promoted to primary server. Once online, the standby reestablishes connections with all agents, performs recovery, and proceeds with any queued processes. Because the most intense work is handed-off to agents, a high performance configuration should not have an agent installed on the same hardware as the main server.
The Serena Release Automation server aggressively utilizes threading and takes advantage of any additional CPU cores assigned to it. A small to midrange server with 2-4 multi-core CPUs is ideal, but, because it is relatively easy to move an existing Serena Release Automation server installation to a new machine, starting small and scaling as needed is a very legitimate strategy. The memory available to the application tier should also be increased from the default 256 MB to something on the order of 1 GB.
