Installation and Upgrade > Installation and Configuration Guide > Advanced Configurations > Configuring Windchill to Work with a Remote HTTP Server > Background
  
Background
This section describes the configuration necessary to run Windchill with HTTP Server installed on a machine other than the machine that Windchill is installed on. This configuration is known as a split configuration.
PTC recommends that you first get Windchill running with HTTP Server installed on the same machine as Windchill before reconfiguring Windchill to work in a split configuration. This ensures that you have functional configurations for both Windchill and HTTP Server.
After the system is running with HTTP Server installed locally, you then migrate the HTTP Server configuration to an HTTP Server installation on the remote machine. Note that the remote HTTP Server must be updated with changes to the Windchill installation whenever the Embedded Servlet Engine and Windchill configuration files are modified, such as when a Windchill application is installed or modified.
Finally, you perform configuration updates on Windchill to enable it to work with the remote HTTP Server server. The procedure described here includes instructions to enable Remote Method Invocation (RMI) tunneling. This is not always required, but is included because oftentimes the same security concerns that influence the decision to implement a split configuration also discourage the use of direct RMI to the Windchill server.