We are at the beginning of the building of a 3-tier development/test/uat environment in SUSE Linux Enterprise v9.3. We would like some advice on how the PostgreSQL database should be configured for this environment.
The environments will be installed on three blades of an IBM Blade Center. Due to budget restrictions, we are building the three environments with separate install instances of the HTTP server (3) 1st blade; separate install instances of the application server (3) 2nd blade -- the HTTP server will be installed from the application build rather than as a separate install; and three PostgreSQL database instances on the last blade.
My concern is that building the PostgreSQL databases as instances from a single binary could lead to problems in a development environment. My recommendation is to create three isolated databases (3 binaries) for each environment to mitigate an unforeseen mishaps.
I would like some advice on what would be the best practice for building a development environment, such as described above, in the type of environment described above.