I've been investigating Umbraco from a High Availability perspective and I've seen a couple of posts on this forum which suggest that a mix of DFS (for files) and Database (Merge) Replication *should* be enough to keep a site running even if a primary hosting location is down.
The same posts seem to point to various weird problems that pop up when users try these methods (publishing not working - cache not clearing etc) and as it happens - we noticed these issues when we tried it on our test site.
I was wondering if there is an 'official' way of setting up HA, or if anyone has succeeded in setting up HA and whocould point me in the direction of the 'best practises' or give any advice?
Thanks for this - very useful - if I had enough points I'd throw some karma your way!
I see from the video that Microsoft have come up with something very cool but I've not personally got the skill to write all the extra code that Robertjan talks about in his presentation. I suppose my question is, Robertjan mentions than some of the code 'may be included in 4.7.1' - do you know if Microsoft have contributed some/all of this method back to the community? Is there anywhere a mere server monkey such as myself can implement something with replicated databases with vanilla Umbraco (+ Courier maybe?) without having to recreate all of Microsoft's (admittedly awesome) extra modules? Or do I have to track down an Umbraco guru who can teach me the secret art?
The way of have done it for some clients is load balancing with shared database and NAS for media files / indexes. I would post your exact requirements e.g server/s setup then someone may be able to help.
In a nutshell we're after 99.9% uptime. We have multiple datacentres with nice fast links between them - we want Umbraco to be available in more than 1 datacentre - even if the 'main' DC is out of action for a while (so that rules out a shared DB or NAS).
With other CMS's we've used a mix of load balancers (ARR, Varnish), replication (Merge, Master-Master) and various forms of file distribution (DFS, Web Deploy, Rsync, GlusterFS) - but our success with Umbraco has been limited.
DB Replication seems to break publishing on our test setup (admittedly we're testing against 4.7.0 - so it's a bit old) - data just 'disappears'. So I was hoping there was a 'standard way' of doing this - rather than us trying to reinvent the wheel.
Ideally we'd like to do something similar to the Microsoft thing you showed us - central DB pushing the data to the DC's - then a DC failing is not an issue - as the others take on the strain.
High availability Umbraco
Hi,
I've been investigating Umbraco from a High Availability perspective and I've seen a couple of posts on this forum which suggest that a mix of DFS (for files) and Database (Merge) Replication *should* be enough to keep a site running even if a primary hosting location is down.
The same posts seem to point to various weird problems that pop up when users try these methods (publishing not working - cache not clearing etc) and as it happens - we noticed these issues when we tried it on our test site.
I was wondering if there is an 'official' way of setting up HA, or if anyone has succeeded in setting up HA and whocould point me in the direction of the 'best practises' or give any advice?
Thanks in advance,
morph42
Take a look at http://stream.umbraco.org/video/2098743/multi-environment-team-based how microsoft use umbraco for asp.net site
Hi Ismail,
Thanks for this - very useful - if I had enough points I'd throw some karma your way!
I see from the video that Microsoft have come up with something very cool but I've not personally got the skill to write all the extra code that Robertjan talks about in his presentation. I suppose my question is, Robertjan mentions than some of the code 'may be included in 4.7.1' - do you know if Microsoft have contributed some/all of this method back to the community? Is there anywhere a mere server monkey such as myself can implement something with replicated databases with vanilla Umbraco (+ Courier maybe?) without having to recreate all of Microsoft's (admittedly awesome) extra modules? Or do I have to track down an Umbraco guru who can teach me the secret art?
morph42
Morph,
The way of have done it for some clients is load balancing with shared database and NAS for media files / indexes. I would post your exact requirements e.g server/s setup then someone may be able to help.
Regards
Ismail
Thanks Ismail,
In a nutshell we're after 99.9% uptime. We have multiple datacentres with nice fast links between them - we want Umbraco to be available in more than 1 datacentre - even if the 'main' DC is out of action for a while (so that rules out a shared DB or NAS).
With other CMS's we've used a mix of load balancers (ARR, Varnish), replication (Merge, Master-Master) and various forms of file distribution (DFS, Web Deploy, Rsync, GlusterFS) - but our success with Umbraco has been limited.
DB Replication seems to break publishing on our test setup (admittedly we're testing against 4.7.0 - so it's a bit old) - data just 'disappears'. So I was hoping there was a 'standard way' of doing this - rather than us trying to reinvent the wheel.
Ideally we'd like to do something similar to the Microsoft thing you showed us - central DB pushing the data to the DC's - then a DC failing is not an issue - as the others take on the strain.
Thanks,
morph42
Take a look at command line courier if the databases are not going to be shared http://blog.percipientstudios.com/2012/10/3/umbraco-courier-from-the-command-line.aspx unfortunately we have only ever done things in shared database mode.
Regards
Ismail
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