Liferay DXP can serve everything from the smallest to the largest web sites. Out of the box, it’s configured optimally for a single server environment. If one server isn’t sufficient to serve your site’s high traffic needs, Liferay DXP scales to the size you need.
Figure 1: Liferay DXP is designed to scale to as large an installation as you need.
Liferay DXP works well in clusters of multiple machines (horizontal cluster) or in clusters of multiple VMs on a single machine (vertical cluster), or any mixture of the two. Once you have Liferay DXP installed on more than one application server node, there are several optimizations that must be made. At a minimum, Liferay DXP should be configured in the following way for a clustered environment:
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All nodes should point to the same database or database cluster.
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Search should be on a separate search server that is optionally clustered.
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Cluster Link must be enabled so the cache replicates across all nodes of the cluster.
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Applications must be auto-deployed to each node individually.
Many of these configuration changes can be made by adding or modifying
properties in your portal-ext.properties file. Remember that this file
overrides the
defaults
in the portal.properties file. It’s a best practice to copy the relevant
section you want to modify from portal.properties into your
portal-ext.properties file, and then modify the values there.
Each step defined above is covered below to give you a step by step process for creating your cluster. Start with making all Nodes point to the same database.