What are the server roles in a Sitecore Commerce deployment?

Server role

Description

Sitecore Platform

Content Management server

A Sitecore Experience Platform instance used for authoring content before publishing it to production. For example, a master database.

Content Delivery server

A Sitecore Experience Platform instance used for serving up published content in production. For example, a web database.

Search server

A server used to host search queries. Applicable in a deployment with higher loads, where search solutions like Solr or Coveo are hosted on hardware separate from the main Sitecore Content Delivery server.

Processing server

A server used to host data processing tasks, for preparing data for reporting. Applicable in a deployment with higher loads, which demand a high amount of CPU resources to process data for reporting.

Reporting server

A server used to host reporting services. Applicable in a deployment with higher loads, where reporting services are separated from the Content Management Server. The Reporting Server implements queries against the processed and aggregated Sitecore xDB data.

Sitecore Commerce

Business Management sever

A host for the set of web services used by the desktop business tools and by BizTalk for managing Commerce Server subsystem data. For example, catalog, marketing, orders, and profiles.

Also, a host for the Commerce Server Staging role, which is used to move Commerce Server data between environments or sites.

BizTalk server

A host for BizTalk software as well as the Sitecore Commerce BizTalk Adapters. BizTalk is used for Enterprise Application Integration between Site Commerce Server and a third party system such as an ERP.

Microsoft Dynamics Integration

Dynamics AX AOS server

Microsoft’s Dynamics AX Application Object Server (AOS) used to share application objects and information.

Database

SQL server

Used to store Sitecore and Commerce Server databases.

MongoDB server

Used to store Sitecore xDB data.