Enterprise Configuration

Liferay Portal is a robust, enterprise-ready portal solution. As such, it is fully ready to support mission-critical, enterprise applications in an environment configured for multiple redundancy and 24/7 up times. The product, however, like other products of its kind, does not come configured this way out of the box, and so there are some steps that need to be taken in order to configure it this way.

This chapter will cover these topics in detail. Because Liferay runs on so many different Java EE application servers, it will be impossible to cover all of the differences between these application servers. For this reason, we will cover the configuration of Liferay only. As an example, we will cover how to configure Liferay to work in a clustered environment, but we will not cover how to create the cluster in your application server. Please consult the documentation for your particular application server to see how you can configure your application server of choice to work as a cluster.

We will, however, cover the configuration of Liferay for a number of advanced scenarios, such as

• Clustering and Distributed Caching

• Liferay Workflow

• Deploying Customized versions of Liferay

• Performance Testing and Tuning

During this discussion, we will mention a number of other open source products upon which Liferay relies for much of this functionality. These products all have their own documentation which should be consulted for a fuller view of what these products can do. For example, Liferay uses Ehcache for its caching mechanism. We will cover how to configure Ehcache to enable various caching functionality in Liferay, but will refer you to that product's documentation for further information about that product.

Sometimes Liferay supports multiple products which perform the same function. There are, for example, multiple implementations of Enterprise Service Buses for use with workflow, and Liferay supports several of them. We will leave it up to you to select which product best fits the needs of your project without recommending one product over another.

Unbreakable Liferay

Virtual Hosting

To infinity and beyond

Multiple Domains

Load Balancer

www.mytte.com

www.mytcl.com

www.mypmu.com

Load Balancer

Multiple Load Balancers

App Server Cluster

Liferay Server 1

Liferay Server 2

Multiple Liferay Servers

Database Cluster

DB 1

DB 4

DB 3

DB 2

Multiple Databases

Controller 1

Controller 2Illustration 79: "Unbreakable" Liferay architectureWith all of that said, let's get started configuring Liferay for the enterprise.