Hi All,
I need to design a minimal enterprise architecture of a production environment for Liferay 6.1 C.E.
This portal will have a maximum of 100 contemporary users.

I thought at a minimal configuration structured in this way.
1) One firewall
2) One machine with installed:
a)1 Apache Web Server
b) 2 Liferay instances running into 2 Tomcat
c) 1 Mysql shared by the 2 Liferay instances
d) 1 data folder shared by the 2 Liferay instances

I thought at the 2 Liferay instances in this way in order to guarantee the service continuity when some server restart will be necessary.
My questions are:
- is this architecture realizable? What do you think about it?
- Is if possible to share a data directory between two or more liferay instances? I'm worried about this.

Thanks in advance for your kind support.

Refer below whitepaper from Liferay regarding Liferay Portal EE Reference Architecture & Hardware Requirements.
Liferay Portal EE Reference Architecture & Hardware Requirements

It might help you deciding right environment setup.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
TK

Hi Tejas,

Thanks for sharing the link.

It was quite useful.

Regards,
AD

Thanks a lot!

Are you planning to have 2 liferay servers' active? If so, you may run into locking issues if two servers tries to write to the same file.



You mean liferay instance restart or tomcat restart. Both liferay instances are on the same server so if you need to reboot your server, both will go down.

Just wondering how you're going to backup your database. Always just an online backup?

If you needed to apply a security patch to the OS and reboot the system, if you have apache on the same server as liferay, the entire system will go down
and users will get 404 error. It's usually better to show a maintenance page.

Yes I mean a Tomcat restart.
For the database backup: will be executed by a crontab command daily.
I appreciate your suggestion about Apache. I didn't tought about OS reboot... It's better to have Apache in another server.

What about the shared data folder ? Reading this page http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.1/user-guide/-/ai/liferay-clusteri-2 I understand that I need to setup a SAN. Am I right?

Just an idea, have you thought about clustering Glassfish?

As I understand it then you'd have high availability, and it should solve the problems of sharing folders etc.

I'm not that knowledgeable about it and it is complex, but there is a lot of information about on the internet: e.g. http://javadude.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/glassfish-3-1-clustering-tutorial/

Ben

Clustering the app servers is only part of the problem.

There's also the clustering of the indices, doc library (jackrabbit) to consider. These things are managed in the portal-ext.properties file and apply regardless of the application container you use.

Are you taking the database down or doing a backup on a binlog?

We usually have two sets of apache+tomcat+liferay with apache interlaced to two liferays. This way, you'll be able to apply patches.



sahed ???

Oh, sorry! I meant "shared" data folder.
I can now explain better the question: If the 2 liferay instances are in the same machine, How can they share the same data folder?
Do I need to configure a Storage Area Network (SAN) or can I just mount an Hard Disk partition with an Clustered File System (i.e. OCFS2)?
This is quite important for me, the second solution (Custered F.S.) should be cost significally less than a SAN.

Thank you all for your support

I have a separate server setup or in some cases, I'm using an external shared storage service.
It's possible to put a shared disk on one of the computers but I don't recommend this because if that server goes down, the system as the whole goes down.

FYI, I'm putting my database files on the shared storage too. Note, that I have a separate database server - I'm just putting the data on the shared storage.


Just re-read your question again.


This depends on whether you have a active-active setup or an active-passive setup. With an active-passive setup, you can just use the local drive.