Before You Begin

Before creating a MOVEit Transfer web farm, you must have the following:

  • You must be comfortable with scaling production systems and have advanced understanding of deploying distributed services or a plan documented, approved, and validated (tested) by a professional with this level of understanding.
  • Two or more MOVEit Transfer application servers that will house the application nodes of the web farm.
  • A database server that is remote from the application nodes. (You need to use Microsoft SQL Server as the database application).
  • A fileserver (NAS) that is remote from the application nodes. For smaller installations, this may be combined with the database server, but for best performance they should be separate.
  • A network load balancer deployed between the application nodes and the clients that will be accessing the MOVEit Transfer application (typically from the Internet).
  • MOVEit Transfer installation software, and the MOVEit Transfer Web Farm Conversion Assistant utility (MOVEit-Transfer-AddToFarm.exe). (For a typical installation, you can find this in C:\Program Files\MOVEit\Utilities\MOVEit-Transfer-Utilities.zip)
  • A MOVEit Transfer license that authorizes the use of the number of application nodes to be used.
    Note: MOVEit Transfer 2019 and later versions automatically install a utilities file (in .zip format) that contains the Web Farm Conversion Assistant utility (MOVEit-Transfer-AddToFarm.exe). For default installations, you can find this file in the install directory for MOVEit Transfer in a folder named Utilities. (For example: C:\Program Files\MOVEit\Utilities).

Web Farm Pre-install Steps

Do the following before you create a web farm:

  1. Unless you are using Azure Blob storage, Make sure each node has Windows networking access to the network attached storage (NAS) or file share.

    Normally, this means making sure that TCP port 445 is open between any of the MOVEit Transfer nodes and the NAS.

  2. Unless you are using Azure Blob storage, create a shared directory and a user with full access to it on the NAS.

    This NAS account must be granted FULL access to the shared folder. The NAS account you create or select MUST be a member of the Local Administrators group on the MOVEit Transfer server. For more information about configuring the NAS, see the Remote Filesystem doc page.

  3. Copy MOVEit Transfer database to the database server if necessary.

    If the MOVEit Transfer database is not already present on the web farm database server, it must be copied there before creating a web farm. If you are electing to migrate to a remote SQL Server database from a local MySQL database in addition to creating a web farm, perform that migration at this time. For more information, see How do I convert the MOVEit DMZ database from MySQL to Microsoft SQL Server.

Note: When you upgrade a MOVEit Transfer Server node, ensure that the local logs directory defined in the Web Farm install configuration for all nodes already exists and uses the same path for all nodes (or else create one on each node). If the installer does not find this local logs directory, it will return a failure message and halt during the Web Farm scale-out process.