Overview

1. 1. Introduction

DreamFactory Enterprise, or **DFE** for short, is a virtual hosting system that manages multiple instances of [DreamFactory](https://github.com/dreamfactorysoftware/dreamfactory).

1. 1. Key Concepts

DFE manages virtual resources as opposed to physical resources. DFE is **not** a *hypervisor*, managing things at the bare-metal level. Rather, DFE maintains a logical representation of your *instance space*. This instance space is where each deployed instance stores its block and database data. On single system installations, this is merely a directory. On multiple machine installations, the instance space must be shared between machines. This is easily done with NFS or similar systems. However, it is beyond the scope of this document to discuss shared storage configuration.

1. 1. Physical Components

DFE consists of three main physical components. These are the Console, the Dashboard, and the Data Collection System. A rudimentary diagram is shown in figure 1. These components may all reside on a single machine or be split across more systems if necessary.

Figure 1: Physical Components

1. 1. Logical Components

In order to deploy shared-resource instances, DFE maintains a logical representation of your physical topology. There are three main *logical* components:

• **Mount**: represents a physical storage device, or mount point, where instance data is stored.
• **Server**: represents a physical/virtual computer where various components operate. Each **server** requires a **mount**.
• **Cluster**: represents a grouping of **servers**