Good afternoon,

Assumptions

- Customer is planning install of Oracle WebCenter Discussions in cluster and in two active data centers which have a distance of 300 km apart.

- It is clear for him how to install Oracle WebCenter Discussions in cluster, but not how to install Oracle WebCenter Discussions in two data centers that are going to be active, eg, every post in Discussions will be needed to be replicated between both data centers, supposelly.

Since the Discussion Forums clustering will have the Application servers with 300 Kms distance apart (eg, different data centers), there is a need to clarify some points.

Documentation

Clustering support in Jive Forums is described in Clustering Information (clustering.html & forums-admin-guide.pdf), included with the Jive Forums distribution.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/htdocs/101320ws.html -- Oracle WebCenter Additional Services CD

1. Multi middle tier caching.

From the documentation:
In the middle-tier, cluster-enabled instances of Jive Forums are installed on multiple application servers Caches between the instances are synchronized automatically.

Question #1:

Is this required? Or can we work within an Application Server cluster without having the Oracle (Tangsol) Coherence caching enabled? What does it imply when this feature is not enabled?

Oracle Application Server uses Java Object Cache (JOC), while Jive Forums uses Oracle (Tangsol) Coherence. Is clustering done via Oracle (Tangsol) Coherence?

2. Database settings.

From the documentation:
All clustered instances of Jive Forums share the same database. This could be either a single database server or a cluster of database servers.

Question #2:

The documentation doesn't talk about any kind of database replication. Can we have clarifications on this? Is it possible to use database schema replication? What's Jive recommendation for 300 KMs distance between data centers, is a database cluster reasonable? Replication would seem to be a better solution, no?

3. Attachments

From the documentation:
Attachments are stored on the filesystem. All clustered servers must share a single attachments directory on network-attached storage. The default attachment directory is jiveHome/attachments. To use a different directory, set the "attachments" property in the jive_attachments.xml file on each server in the cluster to a common directory. Copy all existing attachment files to the new directory.

Question #3:

If the Application Servers are distant from each other, is there an other way to store attachments? Like database storage for attachments?

Per my understanding and reading out the documentation (clustering.html) this seems to be possible: "Starting in Jive Forums 4.0, attachment data can be stored in the database. This is the preferred attachment storage mode when clustering is enabled." - How this can be acomplished / configured?

4. Must clustered servers reside on the same local network ?

From the documentation:
Yes. The clustering module uses IP multicast to discover the cluster, which requires all servers to reside on the same local network. If your configuration bridges separate networks, contact Jive
Software’s Professional Services group for further assistance.

Question #4:

In the case the Application Servers host the Jive cluster and the instances are not located in the same local network, what kind of configuration is required?

Cheers,

Pedro.