# Unified Setup

A unified setup is the most basic setup, for training and test environments. It uses an integrated IDOL Server, rather than separate IDOL components. The integrated IDOL Server contains the core IDOL text indexing and processing functionality.

The unified IDOL Server includes the Content, Category, Community, AgentStore, View, and IDOL Proxy components. It does not include Query Manipulation Server (QMS), or the multimedia components, such as Media Server.

By default, it does not include the distribution components, but you can add these to a unified configuration if required.

In a unified setup, you configure all the operations for the IDOL Server components using a single configuration file (except for AgentStore, which has a separate configuration file). You send all actions and index actions to a single host and port, and IDOL Server stores and processes the data and actions centrally.

The unified setup uses the IDOL Proxy component. IDOL Proxy acts as a single point of contact for all your IDOL requests. It forwards all requests to the appropriate component. For example, it sends a `Query` action or indexing request to the Content component, and it sends a `UserRead` action to the Community component. IDOL Proxy also starts and stops the components in IDOL Server, and restarts components if they become inactive for any reason.

The following diagram shows the unified setup architecture in more detail:

This setup is useful for training and testing, because it allows you to easily modify the configuration for the server, and you do not have to understand the whole IDOL architecture. However, for most production environments, the unified IDOL setup is too small and restrictive. For example, it has limited scalability and no failover, it is difficult to add additional Content components to increase the size of the index, and you cannot include QMS.

When you want to set up a full IDOL system, you usually move to a component-based setup, where you configure and optimize components separately, and often on different hardware. For more information, see Component Setup.

Related Topics

- Unified Installation

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