2

I am in the process of choosing a CMS system for a few websites we are about to create. We're running a Microsoft environment, so we're only looking at .NET systems, specifically Orchard or Umbraco. We will be running the sites on a cluster running Web Farm Framework 2.0. We have been testing this configuration with Umbraco but have had some issues that essentially have made it impossible for us to run it on WFF. We have not tested this setup with Orchard yet.

Is it possible to run these systems on WFF in your experience, and if so do you have any advice on common pitfalls?

PS. Some more details on our issues with Umbraco on WFF. I won't go into all the various problems we've had, but as an example: We have issues with synching of physical resources between servers and adding data in the database that relies on that synching.

Maple
  • 350
  • 1
  • 8

2 Answers2

0

Umbraco can run in a load-balanced environment. I've not dealt with Web Farm Framework myself, and Googling for "umbraco "web farm framework"" yields very little except this question, but the recommended setup for a load-balanced Umbraco site is as per these guidelines over on the Our.Umbraco community wiki. In our firm we use the SAN/NAS configuration for large websites which avoids file conflicts - two or more IIS instances, one directory on a SAN/NAS share serving up the website itself.

For Web Farm Framework I'm guessing you'll need to run a similar setup to the distributed file system (DFS) configuration for Umbraco. Set up one server behind the load-balancer as the "master" for doing content edits, and let WFF handle the syncing from master to slave/s instead of DFS.

HTH,

Benjamin

Jamie Howarth
  • 3,273
  • 3
  • 20
  • 26
  • We were running a similar setup to this one, with one NAS server. The NAS server couldn't handle the load, and to buy an adequate machine for the traffic we need to handle we would need to spend >$10k. We're trying to avoid that as much as we can, therefore looking into other options. – Maple Jul 05 '11 at 11:29
  • Hi Maple, see my edits - look at the DFS setup for Umbraco, it sounds remarkably similar to WFF, except you'd get WFF to handle the file syncing instead of DFS. – Jamie Howarth Jul 05 '11 at 13:27
  • Aha. Interesting method you suggest there. I'm going to try this out, see if it works. – Maple Jul 06 '11 at 11:14
0

This is for Umbraco 4.7x Use the configuration editor on the webfarm controller server to include the skipDirective for the umbraco temp directory. Umbraco doesn't like the temp directory being synchronized.

<skip name="logFiles" skipDirective="objectName=dirPath,absolutePath=.TEMP.*" />

I'm having a hard time finding the right syntax for absolutePath.

Also edit the /config/umbracoSettings.config file, and include your servers in the following section:

<distributedCall enable="true">        <user>0</user>        
    <servers>                       
        <server>server1.mywebsite.com</server>
        <server>server2.mywebsite.com</server>
        <server>server3.mywebsite.com</server>
    </servers>
</distributedCall>

Here a link to our.umbraco.org: Installing Umbraco for load balanced environments

Merijn
  • 525
  • 4
  • 12