Multi-Site Configuration
PTC Arbortext Content Delivery can publish to more than one publishing site. Publishing sites are often situated in separate data centers. This ability to operate across multiple data centers allows PTC Arbortext Content Delivery to provide an enterprise level of scalability and availability.
The following screen displays the multi-site configuration.
Note that:
• The Publisher is maintained in one data center (presumably close to the content authoring systems). Although the Publisher and the Viewer are in the same data center in the above image, this is not mandatory. The Publisher may reside in a different data center.
• For using multi-site, each viewer should have a separate data directory for each site. The Publisher as well as every Viewers Site need to have its own database schemas and data directory configured. The data directory is also known as the E3c storage. For more information, see the section Specifying the Installation Directory.
The following screen displays the installations directories.
• At least one Viewer application is established at each site.
• If you are using more than one Viewer you need to have a LoadBalancer to distribute your end user load onto multiple application Viewers. For more information to configure external LoadBalancer, see the section Editing Properties of the Configurator Entities.
• Each site contains only 1 Core. No Core LB is used or deployed.
• Each site has its own Core CMI server.
• All the sites created on Configurator (except preview) are part of the same site group, that is, Runtime.
• Each site maintains database schemas and E3C Storage for the Viewer applications that function in that site. MongoDB is common between all the sites.
• For publishing tasks, the Publisher must be able to communicate with the Viewers in each site.
• Do not remove or edit Site1 (preview site).
In addition to that, the diagram provides the following:
• Recommendations:
◦ Use single viewer configuration in each site.
◦ Use 1 Core Server per viewer for each site in the deployment.
• Authentication is managed in this web tier.
• Corporate load balancers are used to manage the load distribution to the sites.
Example
The following is an example deployment:
• Monolithic for Publisher (same as Monolithic).
• Site1
◦ Viewer1, Core1, and CoreCMI1
• Site2
◦ Viewer3, Core2, and CoreCMI2
◦ Corporate LoadBalancer for multiple sites.
The following screen displays the example of multi-site configuration.
 | • The Core and Core CMI components are automatically installed as a part of PTC Arbortext Content Delivery Viewer Installation package. Same Host name should be provided for the Viewer, Core and Core CMI entities for each site. |
Configuration Steps
1. Install a license server. You can skip this step if you want to use an existing license server. For more information, see Installing a Stand Alone License Server.
2. Start the PTC Arbortext Content Delivery service setup and select the Monolithic (Publisher and Viewer) product setup option. For more information, see Launching
3. Launch the configurator using the URL http://<hostname>:<port>/Configurator. At this point, only the Viewer, Core, CoreCMI, LDAP, and database entities are displayed and configured on the configurator.
4. Add a new tab for a new site. You can rename the tabs as Site1, Site2, and so on.
5. Modify and add additional entities in the configurator in Site1 and Site 2 tabs as per the deployment configuration mentioned in the example, link those together, and specify all the required properties.
6. Configure and modify the general settings entity (formerly the TAL entity) properties, if required.
For more information, see Editing Properties of the Configurator Entities
External LoadBalancer should be configured on top of Multi-site Viewers.
7. Setup the two new Viewer , Core and Core CMI entities on the respective machines (as specified in the configurator).
◦ Database and LDAP configuration must be specified during Viewer setup, and cannot be skipped.
◦ The location of the configurator xml file is …Data/Data/System/Config that is a shared folder accessible to all the servers.
For more information, see section Specifying the Installation Directory
8. Start the services and start using the application. For more information, see Launching .
9. Ensure all the configurations for Publisher, Viewer, Core, LDAP, Database entities is correct for all the sites.
10. Ensure correct folder permissions are available for Publisher and Viewer entities.
11. Publish all the modified changes through Configurator.
12. Restart the Publisher servers and start the Viewer servers.
13. Ensure Configurator, TaskManager and Viewer URLs are accessible.
Benefits of Multi-Site Configuration
The following are the benefits of using multi-site configuration:
• Use multi-site for better component redundancy and high availability.
• Use multi-site for better streamlining of data loading processes and recovery in case of failure.