Category Archives: Infrastructure

How Big Can CMS Infrastructure Get?

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How big can a production CMS server get?

The short answer is as big as your blank check allows.

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As you add users, workflow, translation, heavy publishing, and lots of opening/changing components, the CMS server size will inevitably increase.

Often times, multiple CM services are all enabled on one large machine for the enterprise, but the downsides of that are when one problem happens, all aspects of your CMS fail with it. Below I show what an infrastructure looks like that handles very large publishing loads and is scalable to add more load. The CMS also handles workflow services and translation integration with World Server.

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What, Why Can’t I Publish My Stuff?

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You’ve set up your content delivery environment and have your topologies all ready to go. Your publication has a Business Process Type, so you go to publish your first bit of content…

What? Where are my targets?

Huh? Where’s the target? You try a CME refresh, service restarts, even a server reboot with no luck.

This is a little gotcha that Dom Cronin pointed out at TDS 2016 and which I missed. As well as creating a business process type (BPT), that BPT also needs to be specified in a publication’s properties before you can publish items to it from that publication.

So, add your BPT to your publication’s properties

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and you will have your target available when publishing items from your publication. All is now good with the world.

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WebSphere 8.5.* Content Delivery Issues

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Recently I was involved in the setup of a new content-delivery environment, migrating from a WebSphere 7.* application server to WebSphere 8.5.5. Right away when we started up the application, we started seeing some content-delivery errors with our session preview web-service which we did not experience on WebSphere 7. I’m going to review the problem, and talk about how it was resolved. Continue reading →

Building and automating a scaled out Fredhopper/SmartTarget environment

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While designing and building a Fredhopper/SmartTarget enterprise environment recently, a couple of interesting requirements came up. The first requirement, these days quite often asked for when building infrastructures, was that every Fredhopper component needed to be to be automatically deployed, configured and run. The second hard requirement was that in a production environment being under constant high load and being distributed across multiple data centres, the Fredhopper Index servers need to be in sync and highly available in each data centre, while having failover mechanisms causing the least amount of disruption time. After a lot of headache, trialling, erring and creating a mountain of broken Fredhopper instances in the process, we finally managed to meet requirements and this post shows the how of it.
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Running a .Net DD4T application on Linux

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DD4T .NET on Linux

 

At the Tridion Developer Summit in September Siawash Shibana and Albert Romkes gave a presentation of a DD4T .NET application running under vNext (The codename for the next .NET framework) on Linux.

Siawash and Albert made the application available publicy and although it currently uses mock SDL Web 8 provider objects plugging this into a real life content delivery service should be really simple when SDL Web 8 is released this month.

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TridionRsaProtectedConfigurationProvider, and the Art of Zen

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And it's Monday. Just sayin'.

And it’s Monday. Just sayin’.

“R-S-A protected configuration provider?! What the f#$k is that, and why the f#$k is it dying an inglorious death while taking my CM with it?!” Those words, friends, are mine. It’s a rare issue that can make me angry enough to club a baby seal silently whisper expletives at an inanimate object, but it’s Monday. And I’ve had coffee… lots of coffee. Y’see, I’ve recently been involved in upgrading an entire organization’s mission-critical servers from 2011 to 2013. For the most part, as we all hope in such circumstances, it’s been a breeze; nothing to set the pulse aflutter. Until today. And that terrible, miserable, unhelpful exception provided by ASP.NET.

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Content Delivery on Redhat Linux with Oracle 12c – Part 1

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This is the first in a three part series on setting up Tridion Content Delivery on Redhat Linux with an Oracle 12c database.

Read part two of the guide that steps through the Oracle Database installation and part three that deals with the Tridion Content Delivery database installation.

SDL’s Tridion documentation does not go very deep into the set up of Content Delivery in a Linux environment and I have found little content out in the community around this. I thought that it would be valuable to create a few videos that step through the installation of a Redhat Linux server with Oracle 12c for Content Delivery for those with little Linux and Oracle experience. This isn’t intended as a set up guide for a production server (That’s what sysadmins and DBAs live for) but it will give you your own instance of a working Linux/Oracle CD environment that you can play around with.

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