VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Technical Requirements

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 one of two options:

• VSys One and VSys Live hosted by your IT department, or
• VSys One and VSys Live hosted by us.

IT department tasks

For self-hosting, your IT department will provide:

• A SQL Server database used by all of the VSys tools
• A Windows Server 2008R2 or Server 2012 environment in which to run VSys Live, with
  • 4GB+ memory
  • 40GB disk space
  • Two or more CPU cores of 2GHz+
• An SSL certificate for the VSys Live site. 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.
• Network connectivity, including:
  • Passing HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) traffic through your firewall to the VSys Live server (Some organizations put VSys Live behind a reverse proxy. VSys Live will work fine in this configuration.)
  • Ensuring that this server can access your SQL Server database.
• Mail server access: 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.

(With the exception of the SSL certificate, all of these are relevant only if you're self-hosting VSys and VSys Live.)

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.

Security

VSys Live uses only secure connections when communicating externally. Internally though, Thin and Apache connect to VOXI over unsecured, unauthenticated connections for performance reasons. As long as these are running on the same server, 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 these tools are separated, you'll want to make sure that the session running VOXI only accepts inbound connections from the session running Apache and Thin.

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 and the other applications 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.

Where does it go?

VSys Live and VSys One need to be in the same place. We (the VSys One folks) can host VSys for you, or you can host it internally. But that decision affects all of VSys: VSys One, VSys Lite, and VSys Live use the same database and can’t be separated (much) from each other. Even with a fast network connection, latency – the time it takes for a request to be sent, received, and a response sent back – would kill the performance and make it all hideously slow.

This means that everything VSys is in:

• Your datacenter, and managed by your IT folks, or
• Our datacenter, managed by us.

For either choice your data always belongs to you and is never intermingled with any other customer’s data, transferred to other organizations or used in any way without your permission.

Updating VSys Live

When you customize VSys Live, you're not writing new software: you're adding content and making settings that add to the existing VSys Live. And when we create new features, those features aren't built solely into your copy of VSys Live, causing yours to be incompatible with everyone else's.

This means that unlike many other systems, when we release an update to VSys Live, if you have a current support/maintenance agreement, you can use that new update, getting the new features and functions, without having to re-do all of your hard work, and without paying a developer to re-add those new features your copy of VSys Live.