Summary Statement

Alfresco reduces your ECM costs by up to 96% compared to proprietary systems like Documentum, Open Text and SharePoint. It’s as simple to use as a shared drive or SharePoint and does not lock you in to a proprietary stack.

ServerTemplate Summary

The Alfresco templates are designed to be used in a high availability, autoscaling cluster with dedicated load balancers (HAProxy), redundundant MySQL servers (Master and Slave), and dedicated NFS content server.  All these templates are available to RightScale premium subscribers only.  The free Developer accounts will not have access to these server templates.  The following diagram illustrates a typical deployment:

 

Documentation:

As the diagram above shows the Alfresco deployment represents a high availability cluster of servers that can autoscale based on user demand.  Content is stored on an NFS server which shares files between all the Alfresco application servers.  Metadata is stored in a MySQL database that has a slave which replicates from it.  The NFS and MySQL servers store their data on EBS volumes which are persistent.  In addition, each has scheduled backups for archival and data recovery purposes.

Because there are so many servers involved in this deployment it is important to take things step by step.  It is assumed that you are somewhat familiar with RightScale and have setup server's and deployments before.  If you hove not we highly recommend the Tutorials section of the support pages to get some familiarity with setting up servers prior to trying to setup an Alfresco deployment.

NOTE: All templates should use the RightImage CentOS_5.2_i386_v4.2.4 (ami-6d749504).

Load Balancing Tier

The loadbalancers are dedicated HAProxy servers.  There are two of them so that if any one goes down the site does not go down.  You can use a single load balancer for testing purposes.  Use server template LB Apache+HAproxy v4 [rev 3] which is available from Design -> Library.

App Server Tier

To begin testing your deployment you will want to put a single server directly into your deployment (not as part of an array).  Once the deployment is all working you can setup the array (it will use the same template and inputs).  The Alfresco template to use is ALFRESCO Tomcat6 App Server [rev 1] which is available from Design -> Library.

Database Tier

The databases are set up according to the following tutorials.  The ServerTemplates MySQL EBS [rev 13] are available in the Library (Design -> Library).  It is not necessary to imprt a database schema with a database on it if this is an initial install (you are not migrating your existing database).  If you are creating a schema from scratch it is VERY IMPORTANT to create the alfresco schema using the following commands:

create database alfresco default character set utf8; grant all on alfresco.* to 'alfresco'@'%' identified by 'alfresco' with grant option; 

NFS Tier

The NFS template NFS Server Master v1 [rev 3] is available in the Library (Design -> Library).  There are no tutorials for this but you will need to create an EBS volume and attach to your NFS server.  Here are some guidelines on inputs:

Deployment Inputs

The inputs for all the servers can be filled in at the deployment level so that the inputs are shared across servers.  The following is a guideline for the input values to use.  You will of course change many of these to suit your individual deployment.  You can use the default inputs from the server templates except for the following:

ADMIN_EMAIL	text	root@localhost
ALFRESCO_CLUSTER_INITIAL_HOSTS	text	localhost
ALFRESCO_CLUSTER_NAME	text	ALFRESCO
APACHE_MPM	text	worker
APPLICATION	text	alfresco
APPLICATION_CODE_BUCKET	text	alfrescocloud
APPLICATION_CONFIG_BUCKET	text	alfrescocloud
APPLICATION_CONFIG_PACKAGE	text	shared.zip
APPLICATION_ENDORSED_BUCKET	text	alfrescocloud
APPLICATION_ENDORSED_PACKAGE	text	endorsed.zip
APPLICATION_WAR_FILENAME	text	alfresco.war
HEALTH_CHECK_URI	text	/alfresco/images/logo/alfresco_enterprise.gif
LB_APPLISTENER_NAME	text	www
LB_BACKEND_NAME	env	EC_INSTANCE_ID
LB_HOSTNAME	text	<www.yourdomain.com>
MASTER_DB_DNSNAME	text	<hostname of your database>
MASTER_DB_PORT	text	3306
MAX_CONN_PER_SERVER	text	255
MON_PROCESSES	text	httpd haproxy
NFS_DIRS	text	/mnt/alf_data
NFS_SERVER	text	<nfs.yourdomain.com>
OPT_MOD_JK_ENABLE	text	true
OPT_PHP_ENABLE	text	false
OPT_SESSION_STICKINESS	text	true
PRIVATE_SSH_KEY	key	<pick a valid ssh key from the dropdown>
WEBSITE_DNS	text	www.yoursite.com

**Items in teal blue will deploy a demo version from the shared alfrescocloud bucket.  You will most likely want to put your own code in your own S3 bucket.

 

Support Information

For support on RightScale use support@rightscale.com.  For Alfresco support contact cloud@alfresco.com.