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General
Because VSys Live uses a direct and live connection to your database, it must be hosted someplace with a fast connection to that database. This means that it's generally hosted in your IT department, rather than by an outside organization. We provide VSys Live to you as a pre-configured VMWare environment running Windows Server 2008R2, suitable for use in any modern VMWare system such as ESX, or you can provide us with a Server 2008R2 environment (virtual or on a physical box) that we can configure for you. Within the pre-configured environment or what we'll install for you in your environment is:
Plan to give that environment:
VSys Live does not store any persistent data within its own environment. Everything important is stored on and retrieved from the VSys One database. This means that backups of the VSys Live session are not critical, and that VSys Live will not grow much in terms of disk space requirements over time.
Application Diagram
This represents the basic functional layout for VSys Live. 
Network access
For volunteers to access VSys Live, you must pass ports 80 and 443 through your firewall to the VMWare session running VSys Live. (It accepts connections on port 80 only to immediately redirect them to port 443 and a secured session.)
Some organizations put VSys Live behind a reverse proxy. VSys Live will work fine in this configuration.
Mail server
To send out password reset notifications and a few other communications, VSys Live needs access to an SMTP relay. Generally this will be a server running on your own network, but it can be an external server. VSys Live can be configured to use SSL connections for SMTP. It does not require any inbound mail (POP3) access.
SSL certificate
All communications with outside entities to VSys Live (volunteers using a web browser) are done using SSL, which provides end-to-end encryption of all data. All SSL certificates are paired with their FQDN, e.g. volunteers.yourorg.org. For VSys Live to respond using the URL https://volunteers.yourorg.org, an appropriate SSL certificate for this FQDN, or a wildcard certificate valid for *.yourorg.org, must be acquired by you and installed into VSys Live.
Database access
For VSys Live to work, it obviously must be able to connect to your VSys One SQL Server database. You'll need to install the VMWare session(s) running VSys Live someplace that it (they) can make that connection.
Security
VSys Live uses only secure connections when communicating with outside entities (volunteers). Internally though, VSys Live connects to VOXI over unsecured, unauthenticated connections for performance reasons. As long as VSys Live and VOXI are running within the same VMWare session, this makes securing VOXI simple: do not allow any inbound connections to that session on the port that VOXI communicates on (generally port 99). If VSys Live and VOXI are separated, you'll want to make sure that the session running VOXI only accepts inbound connections from the session running VSys Live.
Linux vs. Windows
VOXI, VSys Live's business logic layer, is a Windows application and must be run on a Windows machine. Your Internet firewall, Apache and Thin (or other Ruby web server) can be run in a Linux environment. Having VOXI on a different machine from Thin is not a problem as long as firewalls prevent any other system from accessing VOXI and there is a minimum of latency between the two systems.